5G - From the road to the screen in milliseconds

 "The Porsche development center in Weissach is the first company campus in Europe to be equipped with pure 5G mobile communications. What that should bring - and what the local neighbors get out of it. 

There, another one. The sports car shoots out of the curve. The engine roars when the driver accelerates, then the car is gone again, disappeared around the next bend. The noise hardly attracts the attention of the people who work here. They would be more likely to notice if it was missing. It's something like the music to accompany your job here in Weissach near Stuttgart: All of the manufacturer's new vehicles are designed and developed in the Porsche development center, including the test drives on the company's own premises, including the test track. Packed with sensors and computers, the future Porsches race over the irregular oval with its many curves. 

When the test vehicle is back, the engineers download the data and put it into high-performance computing systems. You should read things out of the data that a person could hardly discover because of the amount of data. 

Your work is likely to change soon - for the better, Michael Steiner, Chief Development Officer, is certain. The Porsche development center in Weissach is the first company site in Europe to have its own network with the fastest wireless technology currently available: 5G. Fast means above all reacting quickly, and anyone who knows a little bit already knows what this is about: A 5G network in which the entire chain - from the antennas to the core network - supports this new standard. This has not yet been the case at many 5G locations, as 4G and 5G technology are used together. 5G standalone has become a technical term for it - a word that Hannes Ametsreiter does not particularly like. Ametsreiter is the head of Vodafone Germany, which has a longstanding partnership with Porsche. Something like 5G super fast, he'd probably like that better. 

Ametsreiter is downright enthusiastic about what this new technology could mean in automobile construction: "There will be fewer accidents," he says. If cars at some point run autonomously, high-quality entertainment can also be offered with the powerful radio technology. And the problem with software updates can also be solved with it. 

Transmission almost in real time 

Of course, Michael Steiner also has all of this in mind. But even more: "It's not just about customer functions," he says in an interview, "but also about use in the development of vehicles." The data from the test vehicles, which previously could only be evaluated offline, will in future be transferred to the developers' screens almost in real time while the vehicle is in motion - images from the cameras and data from the various sensors. 

Steiner's people are already thinking about how they want to monitor the prototypes during the test drives, how they can change settings live and - with the development teams on the screens - go on troubleshooting. Steiner can also imagine virtual prototypes, "I hope that both worlds will soon be able to run in parallel". 

But none of this would work if it weren't for computers that can process this information at top speed. For this to be possible at all, these computers have to be very close to the cell phone stations, at the edge of the network. In technical terminology this is called multi access edge cloud. Such computers close to the cell phone stations can not only help with testing. They are also seen as a solution for providing significantly better services in the car than they are currently, says Hannes Ametsreiter: "Today, cars are limited by the computing power on board - a fast computer that calculates almost in real time, and the fast network could change that ." 

For Porsche, the cloud near the six radio stations on the approximately 100 hectare company site also offers another advantage: the data does not leave the site. 

Slashed network 

Nevertheless, the people near the Porsche site also benefit from the new network. It was built as a public network - near Weissach, where it is still quite rural, the fastest connected milk cans in Germany should now be located. But how does that work together, the public network and the internal company network? This also works with pure 5G technology. It allows the network to be split up virtually, what experts call network slicing. Part of the network is only accessible to Porsche. 

And because of the Edge Cloud, the data also stays at Porsche in Weissach - the car manufacturer hardly has anything more valuable to lose than data about new vehicles. Head of Development Steiner has high expectations of the new technology, believes that a lot will only become apparent when it is used in regular operation: "Creativity is only just beginning." He agrees with the mobile operator Ametsreiter that many functions could be outsourced from the cars to a fast cloud. But, Steiner also limits, one has to proceed step by step. 

And one thing always applies anyway: "The car must be intrinsically safe." That means: Even if the mobile network fails or the connection is bad, security must be guaranteed. "The ESP is not moved to the backend," he says, half seriously, half joking. 

In a hall in Weissach, Vodafone and Porsche have set up a small demonstrator to show how quickly the new network reacts. A human moves a robotic arm. And an arm of the same construction imitates its movement without noticeable delay. 

Could the technology also be used in production? Basically yes, says Hannes Ametsreiter. But this requires a further expansion stage of the 5G standard. 

Response time: nine to ten milliseconds 

The way it is now used in Weissach, response times of nine to ten milliseconds can be achieved - that is four times as fast as the wireless technology previously used. For robots, however, they want shorter response times, but 5G will also be able to deliver them. The goal: a millisecond, i.e. a thousandth of a second. 

 When the time comes, the technology can also make a contribution to more safety in traffic. Cars should then warn each other. Vodafone and Porsche have also demonstrated this together with the card service provider here in Weissach. A car in the opposite lane warns an oncoming vehicle that a pedestrian behind a bus is moving towards the middle of the street. For such a warning system to work, however, a lot has to come together. Here, for example, not only evaluates GPS data, but also cell phone data for the required accuracy. The systems must be able to communicate with each other, only the drivers of affected cars should be warned. Until that works in real traffic, many Porsches will probably still do many laps on the test tracks."