5G Standalone Seamless Roaming for Service Continuity in Cross-Border CCAM Services

The 5G-Blueprint project aims to provide technical solutions for Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) use cases such as tele-operated transport services. These use cases have strict latency requirements and rely on uninterrupted (i.e., seamless) communication. However, achieving seamless communication is particularly challenging in case of cross-border (i.e. roaming) scenarios, where the vehicle’s communication is typically interrupted from a few seconds to minutes. To support these services, we develop a practical implementation of a seamless 5G Standalone Roaming based on 3GPP standards, with additional optimizations to the call flows to further reduce the interruption time. The seamless SA 5G roaming implementation and proposed optimizations are evaluated in a cross-border trials site between The Netherlands and Belgium. Results show an interruption time in the range of 90-150 milliseconds, which paves the way towards enabling cross-border tele-operated automotive services.