The last-thought revenue stream is in the automotive domain through connecting road vehicles to the public 5G network. First and foremost, vehicles require network coverage regardless of whether it is 4G or 5G. Trucks and buses have been connected to cellular networks for more than two decades.

In the connected vehicle’s infancy, operators took a substantial fee for every megabyte transferred to and from the vehicle, which forced automakers to develop applications using the cellular network’s capacity to minimize cost. Many automakers connecting their products will continue to economize with the transferred data to and from vehicles regardless of the better capacity offered in the 5G network. Data-consuming updates of software, which can be performed when the vehicle is parked, will use, for example, Wi-Fi.

Edge computing and network slicing are two central concepts in 5G that have been geared toward the automotive domain. For autonomous vehicles, the trend is to have a central supercomputer performing advanced sensor fusion locally, and similar operations on board. Edge capability in 5G base stations will not be used to the extent anticipated by autonomous vehicles. For public road automation, automated vehicles need to be connected to the network facilitating tracking of them, but this needs network coverage rather than 5G per se.

Network slicing is simply Quality of Service (QoS) in the 5G network. It is based on the traditional QoS model differentiated service (DiffServ), which is the backbone for QoS in IP on the Internet. In the end, data traffic stemming from the end user in the 5G network will end up being routed on the Internet, hence, DiffServ must be supported. Network slicing is a matter for operators to separate data traffic from specific customers to charge them appropriately.

Full Article: IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, Volume 18, Issue 3, September 2023

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