Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson show seamless cross-border 5G communication

As part of the 5GCroCo (Fifth Generation Cross-Border Control) initiative, an EU-funded project, German telecom company Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson are demonstrating seamless cross-border 5G communication between Germany, France and Luxembourg.

In a cross-border test scenario, vehicles across national borders warn each other of dangers on the road. For the ongoing demonstrations, existing 5G radio access network sites were equipped with additional mobile network components from Ericsson to establish a 5G trial network based on principles similar to campus network approaches, but at a larger scale, the Swedish firm said on Tuesday.

5G connections from vehicles travelling from Forbach in France or Schengen in Luxembourg to Germany are seamlessly handed over from Orange's and POST Luxembourg's networks to Deutsche Telekom's network in Germany. This assures that mission-critical connected driving services are always available along the road.

As part of the project, Stellantis and Renault provided vehicles equipped with the Anticipated Cooperative Collision Avoidance (ACCA) connected service, allowing to receive warnings about hazards like traffic jams or broken-down vehicles blocking the road. The ACCA service is running on Mobile Edge Computing cloud infrastructure, embedded in the mobile networks to support low-latency communication and computing for mission-critical services.

By analysing information such as anonymous status data transmitted to the cloud by the vehicles in the vicinity, the ACCA service determines the position of the end of the traffic jam in real-time and vehicles approaching the danger spot are warned with precise information.