5G New Radio for Automotive, Rail, and Air Transport

TL;DR

This paper reviews how 5G New Radio specifications are evolving to support automotive, rail, and air transport industries with enhanced connectivity features for safety, reliability, and sustainability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of new 5G NR features tailored for transport sectors, highlighting their role in meeting specific service requirements.

Findings

Enhanced positioning capabilities for transport safety.

Support for multi-transmission and reception points.

Service-specific scheduling and quality prediction features.

Abstract

The recent and upcoming releases of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project's 5G New Radio specifications include features that are motivated by providing connectivity services to a broad set of verticals, including the automotive, rail, and air transport industries. Currently, several radio access network features are being further enhanced or newly introduced in NR to improve 5G's capability to provide fast, reliable, and non-limiting connectivity for transport applications. In this article, we review the most important characteristics and requirements of a wide range of services that are driven by the desire to help the transport sector to become more sustainable, economically viable, safe, and secure. These requirements will be supported by the evolving and entirely new features of 5G NR systems, including accurate positioning, reference signal design to enable multi-transmission and reception points, service-specific scheduling configuration, and service quality prediction.