Field Trial Activities on 5G NR V2V Direct Communication Towards Application to Truck Platooning

Fifth generation mobile communication system (5G) mobile operators need to explore new use cases and/or applications together with vertical industries, the industries which are potential users of 5G, in order to fully exploit the new 5G capabilities in terms of its application. Vehicular communications for platooning are considered to be one of new use cases of 5G whose low-latency and ultra-reliability are required. This paper presents our field trial activities on 5G NR V2V Direct communication towards application to truck platooning. The authors built a field trial environment, for V2X communications of truck platooning, with actual large-size trucks and a prototype system employing 5G New Radio (NR) technologies, and per-formed some field trials in rural areas. In this paper, we introduce the 5G NR-V2X prototype system. It is most distinctive that the prototype system is equipped with V2V Direct communi-cation radio interface (i.e., sidelink), in addition to the traditional radio interfaces between BS and UE (i.e., downlink and uplink). Then, we present the evaluation results on over-the-air latency performance on the V2V Direct communication of the prototype in an automotive test course environment, and vehicle control message transmission using the prototype in a real express highway environment to assess 5G NR-V2X system applying to truck platooning. These field trial results demonstrated that 5G NR V2V Direct communication capability was able to meet the requirements of truck platooning.