Hybrid Connectivity for Autonomous Vehicles: Conceptual View & Initial Results

Novel services, providing timely and accurate information on road weather, road conditions, or traffic, can enable better road safety and traffic efficiency for connected and automated vehicles (CAV) in the future. The emerging 5G and edge computing solutions create new opportunities for the wide-scale implementation of such services. Yet, it is unlikely that any single communication technology can guarantee service delivery to CAVs in all situations and locations due to the global reach of vehicles. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid communication architecture, covering the key satellite and terrestrial technologies, for improving the availability of digital services to CAVs. The architecture and related use cases are analyzed by using sequence diagrams for selected scenarios as well as by conducting initial simulations from terrestrial and satellite network perspectives. The first-pass results presented in the paper provide technologies evaluation in terms of communication range, and connectivity duration, and indicate the advantages of satellite technology as a complementary technology for message transfer and information synchronization.