DSM-MoC as Baseline: Reliability Assurance via Redundant Cellular Connectivity in Connected Cars

Connected Cars (CCs) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) use cases require stringent reliability for safety and non-safety uses. With increasing network softwarisation, it has become easier to use multiple, redundant connectivity options instead of relying on a single network connectivity. But where should these redundant connections be managed? Is it at a network provider’s core network - i.e., supply side managed (SSM) - or at the CC - i.e., demand side managed (DSM)? In our work, we investigate the use of SSM and DSM for CCs on four separate days and across 800 kilometers of major / minor roads in South East England. For Day 1, we captured performance indicators, and determined hypothetical multi-operator configurations for four U.K. providers and a global Universal SIM. For Day 2, 3 & 4, we built and deployed a test-bed to actually implement network switching and understand performance (incl. for TCP & UDP) either on the road or in a stationary location. Based on our results, we make three contributions. First, we show that DSM can deliver superior performance for CCs more than any individual network (up to 28 percentage points in a hypothetical scenario), or SSM which had up to 4.8x longer page load times. Second, unlike other smartphone-only studies, our system-level study demonstrates that improvements of at least 12% can be obtained in a practical DSM field implementation for a CC. Third, we confirm that the advantage of DSM in a field implementation is higher for UDP traffic (23% better latency) compared to TCP (13%).