Article by: Pierre Bichon, Consulting Engineer EMEA at Juniper Networks
The UK government is investing in becoming a leader in the UK for 5G and has set aside money in recent budgets to do so.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has already seen six new ‘test bed’ end-to-end applications largely focusing on Augmented or Virtual Reality, Rural/Agriculture applications and autonomous vehicles. However, with 5G being driven by the classic triangle of capability; Enhanced Mobile Broadband (more of the same but faster), Massive IoT (a radio interface designed for millions of devices) and Ultra Low Latency, there is a need to analyse the wider challenges facing mobile carriers and industry vertical partners to enable 5G to deliver.
If we consider the automotive sector as an obvious partner for 5G low latency applications, British car manufacturers need to work with the mobile community to ensure a number of factors are in place for successful 5G use:
- The first is a recognition that 5G will not have ubiquitous UK coverage for some years, if ever and hence LTE and LTE-A will be needed in that picture
- The second is that the next-generation mobile core with all the much discussed ‘network slicing’ will not be available and deployed until 2022, hence the latency we have to work with is of the current networks
In this environment, it begs the question of how do we offer the likes of the automotive sector and emergency services a low latency, contiguous coverage and capacity solution across the UK?
The answer here is to look at how applications are deployed at the network edge using ETSI ISG MEC compliant software, securely and across 4G, 5G and satellite – adapting to the changes in latency and bandwidth. Satellite is the only real answer for providing service, albeit lower bandwidth and increased latency, whilst a vehicle crosses an international border. This can be addressed using SD-WAN but also requires a level of collaboration and standardisation which is currently missing in ETSI MEC, 5GAA and GSMA and also needs UK and European government support. It also requires Micro Edge Data Centres to be built at the edge of the network and more base stations to be deployed for road side coverage.
These are all significant investments needed to realise the macro economic benefits of augmented or fully autonomous vehicles, something the UK Chancellor wants to see on UK roads by 2020. However, without the certainty of an agreed system to work with, neither the automotive manufacturers nor the mobile operators will be able to invest in network deployment.
What’s needed is a framework where government enables this collaboration, on a larger scale than the current UK DCMS awards announced in March 2018, possibly using the next DCMS funding call for 5G. To look at larger scale trials, UK vendors, operators and automotive manufacturers and the UK Highways agency must collaborate to create a leading solution for low latency, contiguous coverage communications for automotive and emergency service applications.
