The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) has opened its 5G Bavaria automotive test bed in Germany. At the 5km test area, located on the southern edge of the Bavarian city of Rosenheim, automotive companies will have the opportunity to put 5G functions for connected driving through their paces in a realistic environment. The facility’s test area features a varied road network, which includes urban areas with bridges and underpasses as well as sections of the B15 and A8 highways, all covered by a closed 5G network supported by multiple base stations.
“The automotive test bed is designed especially for developers and users that want to test new connectivity solutions in a real road network,” said Martin Speitel, group manager, automotive, Fraunhofer IIS. “The focus is on testing transmission technology and evaluating specific transmitter and receiver components.”
Being able to determine essential performance parameters such as latency, reliability and throughput can provide valuable insights into a given application’s quality of service and user experience. In addition to the OTA interface, prototype transmitter and receiver components can also be tested under real conditions. Potential measurement scenarios include determining the influence that (massive) MIMO technologies have on reception quality, data throughput and possible driving speeds. There is also the option of using the C-V2XSim platform to simulate certain test scenarios before testing them on the road.
The automotive test bed can also provide a reality check for a wide range of potential application scenarios. Connected car scenarios, for instance, can be assessed for quality of service via measurements of packet loss rates within a realistic application context. Meanwhile, automated driving introduces new functions that can be evaluated on the area’s test routes just as comprehensively, such as the quality of the data connections between the vehicle and the wireless network and among the vehicles themselves.
