LTE/4G Sidelink communications - Communications among vehicles

Hi you all,

I would like to know if it is possible to sense and recognize nearby vehicles through different AutoPi devices; for instance, using LTE Sidelink. My main goal is to create an intelligent transport system (ITS) in a distributed fashion, in which vehicles were able to communicate with each other using broadcast and periodic messages (with info, such as position, speed, etc.).

I would be grateful if someone could help me out and even collaborate on further research articles.

Best regards,

Juan Aznar Poveda
Dept. of Information and Communications Technologies
Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain
juan.aznarp@gmail.com

Hi Juan,

Thanks for your post on the community. If you’re interested you can write to sales@autopi.io. Explain more about your use case and we’ll be able to assist you in developing a solution, for a cost.
Again thanks for posting on the community and welcome :slight_smile:

Philip

Thank you very much! I’ll do it,

Juan

Man, it sure would be cool to use LTE/cellular to create some sort of mesh network. I’d be interested in this, even outside of AutoPi. It seems VERY rare to see people using cellular tech to do anything but connect to the corporate towers. Probably some silly regulation preventing it.

3 Likes

FWIW, I did some research and bought a ton of little arduino-based mesh boards. It’s not that hard to get your hands on something that can handle LoRaWAN, which would allow for like 8-12 miles of transceiver range. I’m looking to cook up some solar-powered camping/hiking/off-grid equipment based on these technologies.

I did not find anything useful on using existing cell modems, which makes me think they’re really locked down from that perspective… need to connect to something that behaves just like a cell tower, and not any sort of ad-hoc nature. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it didn’t come up in my digging. I’d love to grab a dual-SIM phone, with dual radios, and connect to some sort of sick mesh cellular network on one end, with a real cellular network on the other end. Imagine if Apple did something like this by default. They could create an augmented 5G peer-to-peer network with minimal effort. They just have no reason to currently.

1 Like

Hi @scrampker, thanks for sharing your ideas. I used a VPN and socket connections using WiFi connections and some ultra-wide range antennas, but LoRaWAN is even better. Concerning LTE, it is rather restricted, mostly for manipulate it and to create direct links among vehicles, disregarding base stations. This technology seems to be limited to a few companies responsible for developing the forthcoming generation of vehicles’ communications.

LoRaWAN is hella slow, but you could send some baseline data like ‘identity’ GPS, etc.

I don’t know how they do it, but solutions like:
GoTenna
Gotoky
Sonnet
Beartooth

somehow even have enough bandwidth for voice.

I’ve got 3 Meshtastic boards that I need to play with a bit more for hiking and camping.

1 Like