NEC announced that the technology allows sharing of information even in unstable communication environments featuring numerous vehicles and communication terminals.
The company says that in recent years, expectations have been growing for the introduction of self-driving automobiles, automated guided vehicles at factories and drones for deliveries.
However in order to avoid collisions and ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles, it is necessary for vehicles to share information about their surroundings in real-time through mobile networks, NEC notes.
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“In a mobile network, however, as the number of communication terminals that are connected to a radio base station increases, the communication delay for each terminal also increases. Moreover, communication delays may differ from terminal to terminal and may fluctuate every second. As a result, it has been nearly impossible to consistently reduce communications delays to below 100 milliseconds while in busy areas, such as major intersections,” NEC says.
In response to this, NEC announced today that it has developed an adaptive network control technology for controlling networks that prioritises certain urgent communication terminals based on their communications flow, then immediately assigns bandwidth and communication time (radio resources) to these terminals, rather than their less urgent counterparts.
“This technology has been tested in a simulated traffic environment where 100 automobiles and 100 pedestrians were using a variety of communication terminals, such as smartphones, while connected to an LTE radio base station. This testing verified that an automobile's communication delay could be shortened to 100 milliseconds or less and the rate of successful communication could reach 95%,” says NEC.
"We will continue our efforts to verify and commercialise this technology as we aim to see it applied to social systems in many different areas, such as self-driving automobiles, AGVs at factories, and drones for deliveries," said Nakamura.
