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Use virtual drive testing to verify connected car connectivity

Many analysts expect that by 2025 all new cars will be equipped with advanced connectivity using a wide range of communications technologies, writes Karolina Eklund, the head of marketing at Anite. As a result, we are likely to see a comprehensive need for verifying this introduced connectivity.

Today, automotive manufacturers are equipping new vehicles with multiple wireless systems including cellular technologies – 2G, 3G and 4G, satellite communications and V2X technology – 802.11p. With 5G, we should also be able to experience improved bandwidth as well as reduced latency, both important capabilities for automotive use cases.

To verify the connectivity, car manufacturers and their suppliers have to perform a significant number of drive tests. The fact that vehicles travel at different speeds and directions, as well as in different environments, such as rural or urban, creates a large number of network and device mobility and propagation scenarios. This means developers need to take into account numerous environmental profiles that present varying degrees of radio interference and multi-path conditions. This situation is leading to increased testing complexity, a challenging radio environment and potentially more complicated, expensive and time-consuming test procedures.

Since network traffic and the number of cars on the road affects vehicle drive testing results, it is difficult to realistically recreate a situation where specific issues are detected. This is why vehicle drive testing can be quite expensive, time-consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, costs associated with vehicle drive testing rise exponentially when the manufacturer performs drive testing across multiple countries to verify wireless roaming.

In order to reduce these costs and more easily replicate real-world scenarios, developers and test engineers use test methodologies already deployed in the mobile industry, when testing is typically performed in the earlier stages of the R&D cycle and in a laboratory environment.

Deploying strategies for reducing drive test miles
Virtual drive testing is a test methodology, already used by the mobile industry, to verify the performance of devices and infrastructure in a lab-based, automated environment. It accelerates product roll-out by integrating industry-leading lab and field test tools with a sophisticated test automation environment. The solution offers a more cost-effective approach to quality assurance testing in the design and development phases. Virtual drive testing significantly reduces the need for vehicle drive testing by accurately replicating field mobility scenarios.

Virtual drive testing (VDT) involves creating the same real-world scenarios in a lab environment as experienced on the roads. The user is able to capture and record a number of parameters including network settings, signalling to the car module, responses from the car module, radio (RF) environment in and around the car based on the traffic and reflections from other objects such as cars, buildings and trees. VDT Toolset also picks up satellite signals such as GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou. Furthermore, some VDT toolsets enable the user to run pre-produced test scripts in automation with zero or minimal manual intervention.

By adopting virtual drive testing, automotive manufacturers can significantly reduce the shipment of prototypes across the globe, which in turn decreases development cost and time, as well as help to keep new prototypes secret.