The 5GCroCo project has carried out large-scale connected car trials along two 5G corridors that cross the borders between France-Germany and Luxembourg-Germany.

The trials carried out in these corridor areas proved that seamless service continuity on 5G networks can be guaranteed across borders. The service continuity solution implemented in 5GCroCo is achieved through a cross-border (and cross-MNO) handover, which results in an almost imperceptible service interruption time of around 120 ms. This low interruption time is to be compared to the service interruption times that are achieved with other solutions, like Release with Redirect (RwR), which comes in two flavors depending on whether or not an S10 interface is available between the two national mobile networks. When an S10 interface is available, RwR achieves interruption times around 730 ms, which go up several seconds if the S10 interface is not available. In the latter case, the connection breaks and needs to be reestablished, which took more than 6 seconds with the devices used in the conducted trials. In all cases the service interruption time is significantly reduced compared to tens of seconds, or even minutes, experienced today.

The handover solution implemented in 5GCroCo is thus essential to enable continuous driving experiences between 5G national networks when connected and autonomous vehicles cross from one country to another.

The objective is to validate advanced 5G features, such as New Radio, MEC-enabled distributed computing, Predictive QoS, Network Slicing, and improved positioning systems, all combined together, to enable innovative use cases for CAM. 5GCroCo aims at defining new business models that can be built on top of this unprecedented connectivity and service provisioning capacity, also ensuring that relevant standardization bodies from the two involved industries are impacted.