Measuring the Feasibility of Teleoperated Driving in Mobile Networks

Teleoperated Driving is the remote control driving of a vehicle by a human driver. The concept of Teleoperated Driving requires the use of mobile networks, which typically experience variable throughput, variable latency and uneven network coverage. To investigate whether Teleoperated Driving can be possible with contemporary mobile networks, we have conducted measurements while driving with vehicles in the real world. We used complementary measurement setups to obtain results that can be compared. The dataset consists of about 5200 km (4660 minutes) driving measurements. Results show that Teleoperated Driving could be possible, but the high variance of network parameters makes it difficult to use the system at all times. It appears that the speed of the vehicle and the distance to the base station may not influence Teleoperated Driving, while handover with changed radio technology, signal strength and distance to the teleoperation station may have an impact. Possible mitigations to overcome these problems along with a basic whitelisting approach is discussed.