Field Experimental Evaluation on Latency and Reliability Performance of 5G NR V2V Direct Communication in Real Express Highway Environment

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 experimental evaluation on latency and reliability performance of 5G NR V2V Direct communication towards application to truck platooning. The authors built a field experimental environment, for V2X communications of truck platooning, with actual large-size trucks and a prototype system employing 5G New Radio (NR) technologies, and performed some field experiments 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 communication 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 and reliability performance on the V2V Direct communication of the prototype in real express highway environment to assess 5G NR-V2X system applying to truck platooning. The evaluation results demonstrate that our developed 5G NR-V2X prototype system simultaneously achieves the peak performance with the low latency of below 1ms and the high reliability of above 99.999% in a real express highway environment.