10173983Communications On-The-Move (COTM)ClosedFast Start ResponseInnovate UK**The Communications On-The-Move Project** The Connected and Automated Mobility 2025: Realising the benefits of self-driving vehicles in the UK report presented by the Secretary of State for Transport to Parliament estimated:?4G coverage across?major?roads in the UK is currently at 66%, with urban coverage at 84% and rural coverage at 57% and stated:?"This will need to extend further to meet the needs of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity". Connected Car applications are being designed with the expectation of ubiquitous communication to the cloud and will be severely affected by inadequate network coverage. The Connected Car and Intelligent Transport Systems maintain reliance on the Mobile Network?Operators'?networks and Cloud Service Providers terrestrial infrastructure. Data cannot make a round trip to the cloud in time to process the large amount of information requiring?a large amount of algorithmic processing that is essential to?be executed?in real-time for decision-making demands capable of sensing and navigating the environment around the vehicle. The data needed to execute safety-critical decisions has to be accessed via the terrestrial networks and cloud services, but the inevitable unpredictability and unreliability of any mobile network may render that data irrelevant at best and potentially hazardous at worst. Due to the lack of bandwidth at the lower end of the RF spectrum, higher frequencies?are needed?to propagate these faster data rate carriers. Antenna diversity techniques such as MIMO can improve RF path loss and decrease interference. The fundamental need for a user to stay within range of a base station/access point is still paramount. The overall path attenuation at the higher frequency is far?greater, with a need to substantially increase the number of base stations in order to provide coverage due to the cell tower densification issue. The proposed connectivity solution for the Communications On-The-Move project will enable the limited sensor horizon to detect objects beyond areas visible to local sensors,?for aiding automated decisions,?reliable data fusion, validation of distributed sensing, and dynamic information will be delivered?before the vehicle reaches the area of interest for real-time traffic intelligence to anticipate the road ahead, and will enable Connected and Autonomous Vehicles to gain a level of perception and situational awareness that would be hard to achieve from vehicle-based sensors alone for the required level of safety performance. In addition to Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) real-time communications to provide: Mission-critical data and software updates: other vehicles'?telemetry data, Software-Over-The-Air updates, High-definition Maps, Infotainment and the generation of an automatic eCall message.