A Multi-Purpose Automated Vehicular Platform With Multi-Radio Connectivity Capabilities

Internet access has become commonplace in the modern world. As the number of users and the amount of data traffic in the Internet keep rising exponentially, while the requirements of novel applications are becoming more stringent, there is a clear need for new networking solutions. Therefore, one of the key concepts in resolving the challenges of the upcoming 5G era of communications will be represented by multi-radio heterogeneous networks, where the users can gain benefits by either being connected to multiple different radio technologies simultaneously or seamlessly changing from one network to another based on their needs. In this work, we propose a multi-purpose automated vehicular platform prototype equipped with multiple radio access technologies, which was constructed to demonstrate the potential performance gains provided by the use of multi-radio heterogeneous networks in terms of network throughput, latency, and reliability. We discuss the potential drawbacks of using multiple radio interfaces at the same time. The constructed vehicular platform prototype constitutes a flexible research framework for communications technology within heterogeneous networks and becomes helpful for supporting future use cases of industrial IoT applications.