GoKawiilThe history of networking is full of tools that repurposed solutions to very different kinds of problems first. Wi-Fi’s origins trace back in part to a team of Australian radio astronomers trying to detect signals from evaporating black holes. But the data processing tools they’d developed also proved capable at extracting clean messages from any chaotic, echoing signal environment. Echoes are echoes, after all, whether from distant star systems or from the far corner of the house.
I research vehicle communications networks, connecting cars to cars and to transportation infrastructure like traffic lights—for tomorrow’s vehicle-to-everthing (V2X) networks.
V2X research has long relied on models that assume “perfect” or “ideal” network conditions. Which is a simplifying assumption that makes the math tractable. But this assumption doesn’t reflect how real wireless signals behave in a moving, obstructed, high-density environment. That gap is exactly the kind of real-world unpredictability that open radio access networks (a.k.a. O-RAN)—an open, programmable architecture behind some 4G and 5G cellular networks—were built to manage.
So why has the O-RAN standard—which is open and available to be applied well beyond 5G telecom—never been used for vehicle communications?
Solutions to the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) problem have to date relied on new networking protocols built from scratch—only to discover chicken-and-egg problems, thorny standards wars, and real signal congestion challenges at scale.
By contrast, O-RAN allows V2X engineers to reuse the networking protocols already developed for cellular communications. O-RAN was developed assuming cellphone towers are generally fixed in place. But, as can be seen below, O-RAN accommodates mobile “towers”—cars and trucks, in this case—with little additional effort.
Imagining a New Way to Connect Vehicles
Self-driving vehicle technology has largely been an each-car-for-itself endeavor. Tesla’s approach, for instance, relies heavily on powerful on-board banks of computers and suites of sensors spread around the car.
However, as an alternative to the “data center on wheels” model, this new O-RAN approach to V2X that relies on each cars’ nearby neighbors, wherever they are on the road. Each O-RAN connected vehicle can then use a diversity of cars’ sensors and viewing angles for better group coordination and decision-making.
There is, to be clear, no O-RAN V2X test network operating in the world. Not yet.
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