Feasibility Validation of a 5G-Enabled mmWave Vehicular Communication System on a Highway

In this paper, we present an mmWave-based vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication system operating at a 22 - 23GHz frequency band, and evaluate its feasibility and effectiveness on an actual highway through a field trial. Based on a network layout that is well suited for the mmWave-based high mobility vehicular applications, we provide physical and higher layer design details, which are based on the 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standard. We then investigate key technologies to overcome the performance degradation of the mmWave-based system due to high mobility: a user equipment (UE)-oriented beam switching-based beamforming scheme, a fast and robust handover procedure with a two-step timing advance (TA) update, and mobile relaying for providing better quality-of-service (QoS) to in-vehicle UEs. The proposed system design and related key technologies are validated through a real-world testbed in an actual highway test site. Regarding this, we describe the specifics of testbed implementation and provide the experimental results obtained from the trial. The validation results show that the 5G NR-based mmWave system is feasible and effective for realizing high data rate vehicular communication on a highway.