Fewer accidents and greater road safety are central to the vision for automated vehicles (AVs). Enabling that vision requires greater situational awareness and the ability to inform the car and its drivers what is happening a mile in front of them, foreseeing what’s likely to happen next, and automatically taking preemptive actions.
In this guest commentary, Cheryl Ajluni from Keysight Technologies shares her insights into C-V2X certification.
C-V2X Applications (Image courtesy of Qualcomm).
Cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technology provides see-through, 360-degree, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) sensing in good, as well as adverse weather conditions to enhance the functionality and safety of autonomous driving (see the cover illustration).
Editor’s Comments
The future of motoring is in the connected/networked smart vehicle.
As demand rises around the world, the connected vehicle market is one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet of Things, potentially generating application revenue of US$273 billion by 2026, according to Machina Research’s forecasts.
C-V2X complements line-of-sight (LOS) sensors such as radar, lidar, camera, with information beyond their reach, and allows the vehicle to make more informed and coordinated decisions.
Whereas LOS sensors cannot indicate vehicle or driver intent, C-V2X conveys intent by sharing sensor data – resulting in a higher level of predictability in traffic situations such as lane changes, variable speeds, or road hazards.
Day one use cases include safety features such as emergency electronic brake light and forward collision warning, ‘do not pass’ warning, blind spot and lane change warning, vulnerable road user, road works warning, and intersection movement assistance.
Use Cases
The 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) has been instrumental in identifying use cases for C-V2X and has grouped them in the following categories.
- Safety: Emergency braking, intersection management assist, and collision warning are examples of safety use cases. Most of the use cases apply equally to autonomous vehicles and human drivers, with a few exceptions.
- Vehicle Operations Management: Use cases in this group include sensors monitoring, software updates, remote support; they are provided by automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to perform vehicle maintenance and monitoring.
- Convenience: Use cases in this group include assisted and cooperative navigation, autonomous parking, and infotainment.
- Autonomous Driving: This group includes use cases pertaining to Levels 4 and 5 of autonomous driving, tele-operation, downloading of maps, and cooperative interaction between vehicles to be efficient and safe.
- Platooning: These use cases are of interest to transport companies and address applications such as establishing and dissolving a platoon, determining position and managing distance in a platoon, and control of platoons in steady state.
- Traffic Efficiency and Environmental Friendliness: Examples of use cases are green light optimal speed advisory (GLOSA), traffic jam information, and routing advice.
- Society and Community: Use cases here include emergency vehicle approaching, traffic light priority, crash report – which are of value for vulnerable road user protection, emergency vehicles and services.
Day two use cases include autonomous driving features such as cloud-based sensor sharing and network availability prediction.
C-V2X testing will include pre-defined, executable tests for day one and day two use cases, as well as functional tests of on-board units (OBUs) in different scenarios.
In addition, it will test the different software stacks for the different regions.
Is Certification Important for C-V2X?
C-V2X is a relatively new technology in the automotive space, and regulations and standards regarding its operation and compliance are still in their infancy.
About the Author: Cheryl Ajluni is director of solutions marketing at Keysight Technologies. Cheryl is a patented engineer with a B.Sc. in physics and mathematics from the U.C. Davis and has co-authored multiple books on topics like RF circuit design and wireless systems design.
Thus, certification is critical to ensure that implementation is correct, and to ensure interoperability – since there can be loopholes in the standard which results in different vendors interpreting the standard differently.
Compliance with the relevant standards and specifications assures accurate and reliable communications between C-V2X and other connected car and driver information systems, as well as other apps.
Manufacturers that achieve certification can release approved products quickly and enhance their reputation in the market.
With C-V2X, one of the biggest challenges is keeping up with the latest standards.
Solutions need to be up-to-date with the latest evolution of C-V2X requirements, including releases that relate to 5G New Radio.
Test solutions must provide a comprehensive and holistic approach to testing the RF, protocol, application layers to meet quality, performance, and safety goals.
Therefore, certification is important.
OmniAir Certification
The U.S.-based OmniAir Consortium, a leading industry association founded in 2004 with the purpose of promoting certification for intelligent transportation systems, cites conformance and interoperability as the two components of certification.
Vehicle-to-Everything Standards
* tech4tea.com primer
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) is a new genre of information and communication technologies that connect vehicles to EVERYTHING – creating a more comfortable and safer motoring environment, as well as improving traffic efficiency, reducing pollution and accidents.
There are two key V2X competing standards – IEEE 802.11p and Cellular V2X (C-V2X).
IEEE 802.11p is the original V2X standard, and it uses WLAN technology.
The Cellular V2X (C-V2X) is an alternative to 802.11p and the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) and Qualcomm support the use of the technology.
It uses LTE as the underlying technology, and C-V2X functionalities are based on the technology.
In June 2017, 3GPP completed the standardisation of Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology.
Based on LTE, this cellular technology is designed to connect vehicles to each other, to roadside infrastructure, to other road-users and to cloud-based services.
Conformance ensures the technology meets the specification and has been implemented the proper way; whereas interoperability ensures it will interface and work accurately with other solutions.
OmniAir and its members work collaboratively with transportation stakeholders to develop requirements and specifications for technologies ranging from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tolling to dedicated short range communication (DSRC)-based connectivity.
OmniAir has been leading and developing the C-V2X device certification program with top automotive industry members.
Members of OmniAir include public agencies, private companies, research institutions, and test laboratories.
They participate in working groups and committees that develop requirements and specifications in multiple areas of transportation.
The automotive industry is not as familiar with the process of certification as other industries, and may wonder about the costs-to-benefits ratios.
However, certification provides assurance that devices meet minimum performance and interoperability requirements.
Test specifications for the physical layer (PHY) cover typical wireless transmit parameters such as output power, error vector magnitude (EVM) levels, in-band emissions, and receive parameters such as receiver sensitivity and throughput.
Protocol tests will cover test cases for C-V2X’s basic safety messages, wave short message protocol, as well as semi-persistent scheduling – its collision avoidance algorithm to handle wireless congestion.
A Holistic Approach to C-V2X testing
It is important to take a holistic approach to testing of the RF, protocol, message, and application layers of C-V2X.
Some of the important elements that help to speed up testing include an intuitive user interface to simplify C-V2X measurements, a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) emulator to generate signals for realistic GNSS, and a 5G measurement platform to protect initial investments and accelerate deployment of 5G NR that will enable advanced safety features.
The RF, protocol, message, and application layer tests should cover both interfaces:
- User-to-UTRAN (Uu)
- direct communication PHY sidelink (PC5)
Testing can include in-lab testing for development and interoperability testing, in-field monitoring such as test track monitoring and recording, and in-vehicle drive test with monitoring, recording and logging.
OmniAir has certified Keysight’s C-V2X test solution for PHY and protocol conformance based on the consortium’s LTE-V2X based test procedures.
This enables an OmniAir authorized test laboratory with Keysight equipment, to run a combination of manual and automated test cases developed against industry standards.
Keysight’s C-V2X test system is the first in the industry to earn OmniAir Qualified Test Equipment status for C-V2X device testing.
Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) sensor capability may eventually become mandated, and C-V2X will become more than a nice-to-have.
OmniAir certification will be critical to ensure NLOS sensors and C-V2X work correctly in all driving and traffic scenarios.
Tags: C-V2X, insights, Keysight, opinions, Tech Focus, technology, V2X, vehTech
I’m looking forward to all that connectedness and smartness in motoring, but this hunger for digitalisation is just going to exacerbate the global shortage of chips.
Definitely. As it is, the shortage of chips have already delayed the production lines of automobile makers. We’re going to see this digitalisation not only in motoring but in ALL aspects of our lives! So I don’t think that shortage is going to ease anytime soon. 🙁
That’s very true, smart homes, IoT, everything’s eventually going to have a chip embedded… maybe even us humans!
So true but also so scary!