First, 5G when the traffic is waiting for "the melon is ripe"
In the journey of 5G intelligent transportation, the time is neither long nor short. On June 6, 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 5G commercial licenses to China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Radio and Television, marking the official entry of China 5G into the commercial stage.
The three major operators speed up network construction, and plan to cover more than 50 cities by the end of 2019 and cities above prefecture level by the end of 2021.
The 5G network has pinned the hope of the future of the entire mobile Internet industry chain, and will also deeply empower the intelligent transportation industry, which will lead to the qualitative change of the industry.
Why is 5G a mature field for traffic landing? To put it bluntly, in an intelligent era, big data, cloud technology, 5G, AR/VR, meta-universe, etc. are all developed around intelligence.
Intelligent transportation definitely needs to highlight wisdom and completely change the traditional management methods.
Business orientation becomes a part of the production system of the transportation industry, which can guide and assist efficient traffic guidance, improve service experience and enhance management level.
For example, intelligent detection of queue length by video can help customers to flexibly open and close service windows, thus improving resource efficiency and service experience. Through the full-motion video of the airport station, the remote tower supervision can be realized, and the dispatching management efficiency can be improved.
The construction of 5G is a project of the transport layer, but in the end it will be released into the project to reflect its value. In the next few years, intelligent transportation will be an intelligent three-dimensional architecture, including terminal layer, network layer, platform layer and application layer.
The terminal layer, that is, the infrastructure layer, is the nerve endings of intelligent transportation, which realizes the comprehensive perception and detection of roads and the structured processing of perceived data.
The network layer is the pipeline connecting the infrastructure layer with the platform application layer. On the one hand, it uploads the structured data of infrastructure to the platform layer; On the other hand, it provides isolated network resources according to different business requirements.
The platform is the brain of intelligent transportation, which realizes the collection and fusion analysis of vehicle and roadside perception information, provides joint decision-making and collaborative control for different application scenarios, and realizes business management and application services.
The application layer realizes intelligent transportation services such as road condition monitoring, formation driving and unmanned driving.
Through the "end-tube cloud" architecture, the digital twin mapping of ground transportation in the cloud is realized, and the application of intelligent transportation business is fast and efficient by using artificial intelligence.
While waiting for the "fruition", the 5G road of intelligent transportation has to solve several "hurdles" it faces:
First, intelligent transportation also has thousands of scenarios, most of which have their own personalized business. Airports, rail transit, highways, urban roads, civil parking, etc., are all difficult to "get through all the traffic". Faced with complicated business scenarios and a wider customer base, is it only a "scoop of drinks" in a large market or is it coordinated by various departments to do a bigger wide-area intelligent transportation?
For small and medium-sized enterprises, they are definitely doing deep cultivation in what they are good at, and Huawei's big traffic and smart road corps are all scenarios in which 5G is included and put into more possibilities; Relying on the map, Baidu acquired Beijing Elite Lutong to explore the possibility and rationality of 5G sinking in the parking field in the future.
Second, when the end-to-end business and one-stop service of intelligent transportation are extended, it is necessary to have the ability to dynamically load and run industry applications anytime and anywhere, so as to meet the needs of multi-scenarios and fragmentation.
The "road network" of intelligent transportation needs to be more open and flexible, equipment access needs to be simpler and more convenient, business acquisition needs to be more convenient and faster, and business end-to-end experience needs better process and efficiency, which are closely related to 5G.
For example, mobile vehicle-mounted scenes include: public transport vehicles such as buses, taxis and subways; law enforcement patrol vehicles such as traffic patrol motorcycles, law enforcement police cars and patrol cars; and special vehicles such as school buses, escort vehicles, cash-carrying vehicles and dangerous chemicals transport vehicles.
These vehicles need to be supervised, but limited by the current wireless technology and network capabilities, the scope, timeliness and effectiveness of supervision cannot be guaranteed.
On the one hand, due to the lack of bandwidth and stability, it is impossible to realize full real-time feedback, and the real situation of drivers/passengers/vehicles can't be controlled. The number of concurrent channels that can be accessed in real-time video is small, the picture quality is blurred, and there are occasional jams, which can't effectively support the efficient handling of emergencies.
On the other hand, the on-board surveillance video is stored locally, so the equipment is easy to be damaged and the data is easy to be lost, which makes it impossible to reliably provide video retrieval of emergencies. At present, traffic vehicles have become the blind spot of Skynet's monitoring, and we can only get clues by "looking back" afterwards.
Thirdly, from the perspective of the vehicle itself, taking the automatic emergency braking function as an example, in a mature 4G environment, the time delay of data transmission can already be less than 20ms, but when the vehicle speed reaches 120km/h, the time difference between the front and rear vehicles is only 15ms. When the vehicle needs to respond, the time delay of the vehicle after environmental monitoring, data transmission and data calculation has already exceeded 15 ms, which is obviously not safe enough.
However, 5G communication has a data transmission rate of more than 10Gbps and a time delay of less than 1 ms. With the popularization of 5G technology, the problems encountered in the 3G/4G era will be solved.
In the process of road condition operation and management, intelligent transportation records the traffic information along the whole road through sensors, cameras and other devices along the road, and sends it back to the monitoring and operation center for analysis and regulation.
On the other hand, the traffic speed can be controlled by adjusting traffic lights and other indication information, and the traffic congestion can be effectively solved by guiding users to adjust the appropriate driving route to avoid traffic jams.
In this process, data uploading and downloading are indispensable to the cooperation of communication technology, and the promotion of 5G technology will improve the efficiency of monitoring video and information transmission again, and effectively manage the operation of trunk roads.
Finally, with the help of cameras and sensors, intelligent transportation will realize that information such as vehicle information, real-time road conditions, and potential safety hazards that cannot be perceived under manual operation can be effectively monitored.
Moreover, based on the characteristics of 5G, such as high speed and low delay, when the driving system changes in the vehicle and road conditions, it can also make a quick response in a series of operations, such as data transmission and analysis, instruction issuance, startup and execution, thus avoiding serious congestion, accidents and other problems, and fully enhancing people's travel experience.
For example, high-definition video is not a small challenge for network transmission. For the video demand of the whole process visualization, massive video data must first improve the definition of video collection and increase the information extracted from the video, which poses a higher challenge to the video and information return network: a larger network bandwidth can support both a single video uplink bandwidth of more than 50Mbps and multiple concurrent return.
For example, each bridge crane in the port has 18 channels of 4K video wireless return requirements; More stable and reliable network quality guarantee, ensuring the online rate and the quality of video playback, and avoiding problems such as jam and flower screen; Lower network delay, matching the requirement of video delay in remote auxiliary control, for example, the remote control of bridge cranes in ports requires an end-to-end video delay of 30ms.
Second, explore 5G, where is the road to qualitative change?
What is the attraction of 5G. This is the first question to be understood when discussing 5G and intelligent transportation.
Compared with the traditional 4G, 5G has many advantages, such as large bandwidth, high reliability, low latency, massive connection and so on.
With the large bandwidth and low latency provided by 5G, AR/VR can really move from concept to commercial use.
By combining the low-latency feature provided by 5G with computer vision, the robot can be upgraded from simple execution to man-machine cooperation production, and the realization of industrial Internet can be accelerated.
The low latency and massive connection awareness of 5G can realize the communication between cars and roads, provide multidimensional data for AI algorithm, and provide technology for assisted driving and unmanned driving.
Through the large bandwidth provided by 5G wireless technology, it can solve the security scenes that cannot be covered by wires, and make 5G go to thousands of traffic scenes.
Last year, the journey of 5G in the technical field has been analyzed, such as unmanned driving, smart travel, car-road coordination, smart transportation, etc. This article will not repeat it, focusing on the introduction and analysis of landing projects.
Third, the high speed on 5G brings a new experience
The nation's first 5G smart highway project landed in Hubei.
In 2021, China Mobile Hubei Company signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Hubei Jiaotou Technology Development Co., Ltd. and China Mobile (Shanghai) Information and Communication Technology Co., Ltd. in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The three parties will jointly set up "Hubei 5G Intelligent Transportation joint innovation lab" to promote the landing of the first 5G intelligent highway project in China.
According to the agreement, in the future, the laboratory's main research directions include promoting the technical test of intelligent networked vehicles in highway scenes, co-construction and operation of the demonstration section of 5G smart highway, verification of technical standards such as the 5G network coverage scheme of smart highway and the overall informatization promotion scheme, research and development and design of related terminal products of smart highway, etc.
In 2022, Hunan Provincial Department of Transportation said that Hunan planned to carry out intelligent and networked transformation on the northwest and southwest sections of Changsha Ring Expressway and the 113-kilometer expressway expansion project of Changyi Expressway under construction, taking the lead in building 5G intelligent expressway in the province.
At present, many expressway operation systems are still traditional operation modes.
In the case of holidays or traffic accidents, highways are prone to congestion, and it is impossible to use advanced information sensing technology to identify and warn traffic congestion, to make prediction analysis through traffic brain, and to implement scientific and intelligent precise scheduling.
It is understood that China Mobile is using 5G slicing and edge computing to realize fast and efficient data interaction.
At present, China Mobile is relying on the triple play technology of 5G network, Beidou high-precision positioning network and vehicle-road cooperation network to build an intelligent and high-speed operation system with full element perception, high business cooperation, deep vehicle-road cooperation, safe and active prevention and control, efficient road network operation and accurate public service, and to build a multi-level intelligent application system of "transportation-management-maintenance-use".
At present, many provinces are speeding up the construction of the 5G smart expressway test area and test section, such as the demonstration pilot of the reconstruction and expansion of the expressway in Tai 'an-Zaozhuang section of Beijing-Taiwan Expressway; Construction of 5G Autopilot Open Test Demonstration Zone in Fangshan District, Beijing; Hangzhou-Shaoyong Wisdom Expressway in Zhejiang Province, the first phase of Ezhou Airport Wisdom Expressway in Hubei Province, and the expansion project of Changyi Wisdom Expressway in Hunan Province.
Fourth, 5G travels all the way in the city.
Different from high-speed, urban roads are criss-crossed, and signal lights and intersections are everywhere.
222 Relying on Suzhou's favorable car networking industry environment, the first batch of city-level 5G car networking applications in China landed in Suzhou. Suzhou Branch of China Mobile Jiangsu Company and Shanghai Industrial Research Institute of China Mobile set up "Suzhou Mobile 5G Joint Innovation Center". Relying on 5G+ Beidou positioning system, it further promoted the coordinated construction of 5G new infrastructure vehicles and roads in the Yangtze River Delta region, and helped to build the city-level application of 5G car networking.
63.4 kilometers of 5G intelligent networked roads in Suzhou High-speed Railway New City have been reconstructed, with Xiangcheng Avenue in the east, G524 National Road in the west, Taidong Road in the north and Litai Road in the south. Multi-sensor intelligent intersections are built by intersections, including 50 intelligent intersections in total.
At present, as the largest open road 5G unmanned bus project in China, the country's first normalized operation 5G unmanned bus has landed in Suzhou.
The 5G unmanned bus passes through the convention center, shopping center, high-speed railway station, subway station and commercial office building of Suzhou High-speed Railway New City, and is dredging urban traffic capillaries and empowering traffic microcirculation.
The shape of the 5G unmanned bus is quite scientific and technological. Even the most basic mirrors are equipped with high-definition cameras. There are 9 passenger seats in the bus, which is equipped with a 32-inch smart display. Passengers can choose to arrive at the station through the display.
With the help of the 5G network, the car can obtain information such as long-distance traffic light signals, road signs, construction sections and abnormal vehicles in real time, and make route planning in advance to improve the safety of driverless driving and ensure a better ride experience.
In fact, this is the technical embodiment of 5G vehicle-road coordination. Each subsystem is a roadside unit and a vehicle-mounted unit. Each traffic component unit realizes the information transmission and sharing between vehicles and vehicles, vehicles and roadsides, and roadsides and roadsides by wired or wireless communication.
The main functions of the roadside unit are:
Collect all kinds of information detected by roadside sensors (such as traffic flow, emergencies, crowded crowds, pedestrian information at intersections, foreign body intrusion on roads, slippery state of roads), and send them to vehicles by wireless short-range communication, and to other roadside units or management centers by wired or wireless communication.
Receive information from vehicle-mounted units or other roadside units.
The main functions of the vehicle-mounted unit are:
Collect the information (such as positioning, motion, etc.) collected by various vehicle-mounted sensors, fuse them, send them to other vehicle-mounted units, and receive information from other vehicle-mounted units.
Receive information from the roadside unit.
Fuse the received information with the collected sensor information of the vehicle, make safety early warning judgment and vehicle control decision, provide information to the driver in an appropriate interactive way, or send control instructions to the vehicle control unit.
Therefore, in Suzhou, drivers become security officers, buses choose their own lanes, avoid obstacles and pedestrians, and can also receive traffic signal information to realize a smooth journey.
5G empowerment, making vehicle-road coordination a clear direction for autonomous driving. In fact, in addition to the current technical route of autonomous driving, the road coordination of bicycle intelligence has also attracted much attention.
Intelligent bicycle, with more sensors and better algorithms, enables the car to realize relatively safe automatic driving without any external force.
But in practice, this goal is very difficult to achieve. Faced with the complicated traffic environment, including the intention of people and cars, unexpected factors, and restrictions of traffic rules, it is difficult to make a correct judgment. Of course, the high cost of sensors is also a very important factor.
Using V2X technology, under the protection of 5G, the biggest advantage is that it can realize over-the-horizon perception, which is beyond the reach of bicycle intelligence.
Concluding remarks
In 5G traffic, there may be other scenarios, but the universality of landing is not high. Many of them are pure temptations of "crossing the river by feeling the stones", and their technical maturity and application rationality still have no reference value, so they are not illustrated by examples.
022, Pathfinder 5G, the qualitative change battle of intelligent transportation. It can be imagined that the intelligent transportation that shakes hands with 5G will be more global and liberalized, breaking through the time and space constraints, and knowing the bits and pieces of the cave and the traffic and the smooth running of every distant place at any time.