5G CONNECTIVITY For Motorsports

The article explores the feasibility and design considerations for providing 5G connectivity for motorsports

- VARADARAJ YATIRAJULA

There has been interest in the motorsports industry to provide 5G connectivity for the cars on track. Typically, the cars use legacy technologies like Wi-Fi or digital video broadcast (DVB) to provide the connectivity for backhauling telemetry, video, and audio data from the cars back to the pit and media centre for broadcasting.

However, the current solutions provide a limited bandwidth, and throughput is in the range of 10 to 12Mbps. This throughput is insufficient for advanced use cases and capabilities like 4K streaming, 360-degree video, and telemetry for the racing cars.

The automotive industry is also moving towards a software defined vehicle (SDV) strategy, where the cars will need a highly reliable and low latency connectivity for frequent updates to the software, and to push gigabytes of data from the hundreds of different sensors on the cars. The move to electrification and softwarisation also needs a connectivity solution that is future-proof and ready for these requirements and remain relevant for the next decade.

Hence the option of using private 5G networks to provide connectivity for the motorsports industry cars is an attractive proposition. 5G is an option for the motorsports industry as it is designed to overcome and mitigate some of the issues involved in using wireless communications technologies for the motorsports use cases.

Proposed solution architecture

The figure on previous page shows the proposed ORAN disaggregated architecture for the motorsports use case. The solution uses the 7.2 split architecture, which is modular and extensible for the motorsports use case.

In this architecture, the distributed units (DUS) run some of the physical layer algorithms besides the radio link control (RLC) and media access control (MAC) layers. The DUS are housed in the track side units (TSU), which also provide the power for the DUS.