Ilmenau has been selected by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure to become a 5G pioneer region. In the P:Mover project, the city and the Thuringian Innovation Center for Mobility at Ilmenau University of Technology are working together with two Thuringian companies to implement a concept in which innovative 5G technologies make public road transport safer, more efficient and more comfortable.
Lead market for 5G mobile communications standard
In the course of the territorial reform in Thuringia, the city of Ilmenau has to cope with a tripling of its area and an increase in population from 26,000 to 39,000 people. With its above-average expansion, the municipality faces the task of developing new solutions for the transport infrastructure and for innovative mobility. Another major challenge is to provide a modern telecommunications infrastructure for the technology and innovation region with a university as well as non-university and business-related research institutions. Against this backdrop, the city and the Thuringian Mobility Innovation Center are implementing the P:Mover project - a cutting-edge, future-proof concept whose core elements include the establishment or expansion of the 5G network in the city area. The federal government is providing the project consortium with a funding amount of 3.9 million euros for the implementation of the three-year project.
Lead market for 5G mobile communications standard
With the 5G Innovation Program, the federal government wants to test concrete applications under real conditions in order to make Germany the lead market for the latest mobile communications standard 5G. As he says on the ministry's website, Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer sees 5G as the key to the digital infrastructure of the future:
An autonomous vehicle will need about one gigabyte of data - per minute. By comparison, one minute of video in full HD on a smartphone requires only about three percent of that, or 30 megabytes. The vehicles will also need to communicate with intelligent traffic control systems - 5G allows the integration of up to a million Internet-controlled things within a radius of one kilometer. And the whole thing is of no use to you as a passenger if the vehicle doesn't also brake in real time.
Fast data transmission makes new applications possible
The enormous speed that the new 5G mobile communications standard allows for the transmission of data enables a wide range of new technical applications and business models in areas of life such as autonomous driving, transportation and logistics, intelligent traffic control and congestion avoidance, the coordination of emergency and rescue services, the control of technical systems and telemedicine. The performance of the 5G standard is needed above all to master complex traffic scenarios and provide an efficient communication infrastructure for operators and for users - the technology fields in which the city of Ilmenau and the Ilmenau University of Technology prevailed with their application "Pioneer Region: Networking Mobility Solutions in Suburban Areas (P:Mover)" to the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure. Four partners from Thuringia will explore various innovative 5G application fields in the networked transport sector of the future in their joint project: The city of Ilmenau, the Thuringian Innovation Center Mobility and the companies Funkwerk Systems, a provider of train radio and communication systems as well as passenger information and safety systems from Kölleda, and Ginger Lehmann+Partner, an innovative digital road surveyor from Erfurt.
Innovation boost for Ilmenau as a research location
Topics of P:Mover are the mobility space on road and rail, municipal tasks in the transport sector and a broad spectrum of mobility-related services. All of these fields of work build on the 5G standard and cover three interlinked fields of action and application: business, science and municipal tasks. In the economic field, the project partners are considering the operation of radio networks and IT infrastructure in addition to buses and trains in local public transport. In the scientific field, largely driven by ThIMo, scientists and engineers are working on connected and automated driving, electromagnetic environmental compatibility, multi-standard radio technologies and data engineering. Municipal tasks that are to be made future-proof with the 5G standard are traffic concepts, traffic control, and traffic infrastructure.
The P:Mover project is intended to give the research location Ilmenau and the local and regional economy a boost in innovation in the fields of autonomous driving, radio technology, and informatics, and to set new standards for practical applications of the 5G standard.
Contact
Prof. Matthias Hein
Director of Thuringian Mobility Innovation Center