Teleoperated Support for Remote Driving over 5G Mobile Communications

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile communications promise far more capabilities than competing technologies and are expected to enable a wide range of vertical use cases. Among them, remote driving has attracted much interest from both academia and the industry, either as a stepping stone on the road to fully autonomous driving or as its complement constituting a fallback/backup service. This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a teleoperated support (TeSo) service over 5G mobile communications, realized within the framework of the “5G HEalth, AquacultuRe and Transport (5G-HEART)” EU project. We present an end-to-end service architecture and a complete implementation, accompanied by validation trials and performance measurements in a real pilot over a commercial 5G network deployment with an actual vehicle that has been extended to support a variety of experimentation options. With this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed TeSo service, and we quantify various performance metrics of interest, such as latency, jitter, throughput, and loss rate for longer-term reference use.