Performance evaluation of automotive off-board applications in LTE deployments

The new cellular communication standard 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) promises high throughputs and low latencies, thus enabling even 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 different quality of service (QoS) settings. In this paper we analyze the suitability of LTE for future automotive off-board services in terms of transmission delays and reliability under various QoS settings. Our investigations are based on extensive LTE system-level simulations under different load conditions and network deployments as well as on a theoretical delay analysis. The results show that an accurate selection of the LTE QoS parameters is crucial in order to meet the delay and reliability requirements of future automotive applications, especially in high-load network conditions.