Field Trial Activities on 5G NR V2V Direct Communication Towards Application to Truck Platooning

Fifth generation mobile communication system (5G) mobile operators need to explore new use cases and/or appli-cations together with vertical industries, the industries which are potential users of 5G, in order to fully exploit the new 5G capabilities in terms of its application. Vehicular communica-tions for platooning are considered to be one of new use cases of 5G whose low-latency and ultra-reliability are required. This paper presents our field trial activities on 5G NR V2V Direct communication towards application to truck platooning. The authors built a field trial environment, for V2X communications of truck platooning, with actual large-size trucks and a prototype system employing 5G New Radio (NR) technologies, and per-formed some field trials in rural areas. In this paper, we introduce the 5G NR-V2X prototype system. It is most distinctive that the prototype system is equipped with V2V Direct communi-cation radio interface (i.e., sidelink), in addition to the traditional radio interfaces between BS and UE (i.e., downlink and uplink). Then, we present the evaluation results on over-the-air latency performance on the V2V Direct communication of the prototype in an automotive test course environment, and vehicle control message transmission using the prototype in a real express highway environment to assess 5G NR-V2X system applying to truck platooning. These field trial results demonstrated that 5G NR V2V Direct communication capability was able to meet the requirements of truck platooning.