LTE for Vehicular Communications

The cellular communication networks standard 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) offers low latencies and high throughputs simultaneously, thus enabling more bandwidth-demanding and real-time critical services for end-users. This is of particular interest for vehicle manufacturers who in the future intend to offer a huge variety of cooperative driver assistance services with manifold quality of service requirements. This chapter analyzes the suitability of LTE as a wireless transmission technology for future vehicular services of the categories Infotainment, Comfort, Traffic Efficiency, and Safety. The investigations are based on extensive LTE system-level simulations under different load conditions and network deployments as well as on a theoretical delay analysis. Focus is set on transmission delays and reliability aspects under various quality of service settings. The results show that an accurate selection of the LTE quality of service parameters is crucial in order to meet the delay and reliability requirements of future automotive applications, especially in high-load network conditions.