On the Feasibility of Using 5G Enabled Smartphones to Improve Safety of Vulnerable Road Users

Autonomous vehicles require sophisticated sensors to safely and timely detect the conditions of the world around them and act accordingly. However, just like human senses, sensors have limitations and blind spots. Vulnerable Road Users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, are at particular risk since they can quickly come to the road from a blind spot too late for the vehicle to react. This article evaluates the use of a commercial 5G-enabled smartphone and a purpose-designed app to advertise a Vulnerable Road User position to a connected autonomous vehicle using European Telecommunications Standards Institute standard messages. The results obtained in a real testbed proved that a 5G network is capable of supporting the low latency required for this use case, even though the usefulness of the positioning data transmitted was limited by the accuracy of the GPS embedded in commercial smartphones.