DRIVING INTO THE FUTURE

I’m happy to share my vision for the future of transportation in the following decades.

Please find below my article attached.

Abstract

I present the actual status of the transportation evolution, focusing on the deliverables of key industries such as automotive, IT, and telecommunication.

In the next 50 years, the main transportation evolution will be the shift of traffic management from individual vehicles to centralized solutions. Such a centralized application could unlock the potential of transport evolution for:

Ultra-high level of safety
Increase the speed of vehicles transporting people or goods from A to B.
Shorter travelling time reduces the utilization of the existing roads.
Reduce overall transportation’s environmental impact.
Provide prioritizations for all vehicles, thus enabling programmable transportation.

Autonomous vehicles are a must as soon as possible, but because they act independently, they might not be the most efficient solution for future transportation. But what if we could organize and coordinate them together? A three-step evolution path details the transition from individual autonomous vehicles to fully cooperative and coordinated vehicles.

New SW architectures must be implemented to support new centralized applications and telecommunication networks must be developed to provide proper connectivity and accessibility to vehicles and applications. The challenge is enormous for service providers to transform the existing brown-field networks into a future-proof network. The service provider’s future role may be limited as other communication options emerge, like satellite, public networks, and short-range comms would be used.

I’ve prepared a high-level application design that includes traffic management policies, active/passive inventory, application instance management, and a traffic system application instance with a continuous situation engine and connectivity management.

Listing the required network capabilities of a central traffic management application based on 3GPP KPIs for transport use cases, including expected KPI values, new application hosting locations and resource management.

Critical telecommunication network development to support future transportation use cases and central traffic management applications:

Connect mobile base stations to the application location with meshed architecture, ideally directly or via ring topology.
Replacing actual physical and logical topologies with a more meshed topology to enable low latency and high mobility for applications.
Enable application hosting at the access, backhaul, and backbone networks, but at least from the backhaul router locations towards the core sites. Roll out the required virtual infrastructure to these locations.
Enable fast application session handovers among neighbour application locations.
Implement mobile network resource orchestration to allow dynamic resource allocation per application requirements.
Enable high upload speed up to 50-60Mbps everywhere.

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