Partners: Smart City Consultancy Limited (Lead), Dell Corporation Limited, Milton Keynes Borough Council, Ohmio UK Limited. 

StreetCAV will create a ‘plug-and-play’ roadside connectivity solution enabling self-driving shuttles, robotic and drone-based services to operate safely and securely, maintaining connections wherever they go.  With world-class experts and UK-based partners, we will deploy StreetCAV and a new self-driving shuttle service into Milton Keynes, as a blueprint for UK-wide deployment. 

The specific technological developments we anticipate as part of the StreetCAV project are as follows:

• Development of extremely high density and ultra-low latency street-side connectivity that meets the demands of CAV service provision and can offer multi-service provision in the future in order to support a ‘build once, use many’ model; the challenges we will address include the provision of high-density, small cell capabilities to provide direct line-of-sight along the whole route in order to enable the low latency and ubiquitous connectivity required to support safe CAV operations; we will also demonstrate how additional value-added services, e.g., to provide enhanced situational awareness or advanced monitoring capabilities can be integrated into the end-to-end solution to provide a fully-optimised CAV connectivity solution that enhances the overall safety case.
• Integration of all necessary components into a form-factor that is acceptable to local planners, retailers, hospitality venues etc., and that offers the opportunity to add other services as part of an integrated street-side deployment, e.g., EV charging, lighting etc.  Our new product can be provided as a fully integrated street pole, or as a unit that can be simply and easily deployed onto existing street furniture and council owned assets, e.g., lamp posts, signage, bus stops etc.
• Delivery of a cost-effective connectivity solution that can be seamlessly deployed to provide ubiquitous coverage along the whole route, either as part of a public- or private- 5G network; the StreetCAV small cell is intended as a cost-competitive new offering into the marketplace that can be simply and easily deployed into street-side environments with minimal disruption and in a way that is aesthetically pleasing; we plan to offer multiple services from the new infrastructure, both in terms of different connectivity services (e.g., citizen wi-fi), as well as other services of use to municipalities, e.g., EV charging, lighting etc., enabling new and different infrastructure investment models to be developed as part of local authority planning and management; the cells we develop are also intended to be easy to operate and maintain again reducing cost-to-serve and minimising disruption.
• Delivery of a complete CAV-optimised solution that includes additional value-added features to support CAV safety, e.g., advanced situational awareness and advanced monitoring capabilities.
• Delivery of a future-proofed solution that can take advantage of forward-looking technological advances, in order to extend capability and coverage, e.g., non-terrestrial, space-enabled, satellite backhaul-based networks, exploitation of direct-to-handset services, use of high-altitude platforms or integration of OpenRAN capability; whilst the initial product we develop as part of the project will NOT include these features, we see these as part of the forward-looking product development roadmap and will design the product with these are other developments in-mind, making it easy to add these (and other) new features at a later stage and as the respective technologies mature.
• Development of new commercial models that support these deployments, e.g., managed as part of a city-wide infrastructure planning and management strategy, leveraging existing street-side assets and utilising shared infrastructure, neutral host and other innovative commercial models to support rapid service deployment.
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