Communications Requirements for Cooperative Automated Driving: Why we don’t need URLLC

The fifth generation of mobile radio networks (5G), under the coined term ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), promises a quality-of-service without precedence. Such claims have motivated researchers and engineers to conceive and study use-cases that benefit from such performance. Two fields have gained special attention; automated transportation systems and industrial manufacturing. While URLLC might be sometimes necessary, the communications engineering community have overseen a major opportunity in specifying and reducing the demands of dynamic networked control systems. Since this kind of systems are band-limited processes, by understanding their dynamic properties one can derive their communications requirements under a defined performance metric. In this paper, a platooning example is considered to illustrate these claims. We show that the demands on the communications technology by the control system in terms of transmission intervals and packet losses are dictated by the control system’s dynamic properties. Results demonstrate that the communications requirements of platooning do not always fall in the definition of URLLC and opens the possibility for designing control-aware radio resource allocation schemes that can exploit the dynamic properties of networked control systems as degrees of freedom in the allocation.