Is C-V2X the future backbone of Connected Vehicle Data?

Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) is a cutting-edge communication technology that enables vehicles to communicate with each other and to the surrounding infrastructure. As the name suggests, C-V2X uses cellular networks for real-time data exchange, and due to being designed for use on 4G & 5G networks, it is being viewed as a fundamental communication technology for the future of connected vehicles and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). By facilitating communication (as the name would suggest) from the “vehicle-to-everything” it can enable “smart” road safety, advanced traffic management, and the operation of autonomous driving systems. As alluded to, C-V2X encompasses various communication sub-types, including: Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) which we will cover in more detail in separate posts.

A brief history of C-V2X

C-V2X's journey began in 2016 with the introduction of the LTE-V2X standard by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and marked the formal entry of C-V2X into the vehicular communication landscape. Utilising 4G LTE networks, early field trials and pilot projects were conducted globally between 2017 and 2018, involving notable companies like Qualcomm, Audi, and Ford.

In the years that followed “5G-V2X” (using 5G networks) was introduced bringing with it improvements in latency, data transfer rates, and overall performance; essential for data-intensive advanced applications like autonomous driving and smart infrastructure and since 2020, C-V2X has rapidly evolved, with increasing commercial deployments and integration into smart city projects.

Why do we “need” C-V2X?

Simply put, necessity. The future systems being developed require – comparative to today’s connectivity standards – bandwidth that is an order of magnitude higher. Take OnStar for example. If deployed in a vehicle of circa 2020 vintage, the bandwidth required for the emergency assistance, real-time traffic updates and vehicle diagnostic data, from a 1 hour drive, would be in the region of 60 Kbps for a total of 14MB.

Compare this to the bandwidth required ONLY for real-time traffic management in a connected vehicle - which is around 100 Kbps for continuous traffic updates and data transfer - and for one service, the data requirement is 45MB. Couple in video streaming, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and the myriad of additional automated services connected vehicles are increasingly featuring, and the bandwidth requirements are obvious.

Couple this with the relative ease of deployment for C-V2X (4/5G networks are already mature and globally standardised) vs DSRC and the relative signal reliability and low latency (for example vs WIFI) and it starts to become clear that future data infrastructure, will certainly be reliant on C-V2X.