To share or not to share: reliability assurance via redundant cellular connectivity in Connected Cars

As adoption of connected cars (CCs) grows, the expectation is that 5G will better support safety-critical vehicle-to-everything (V2X) use cases. Operationally, most relationships between cellular network providers and car manufacturers or users are exclusive, providing a single network connectivity, with at best an occasional option of a back-up plan if the single network is unavailable. We question if this setup can provide QoS assurance for V2X use cases. Accordingly, in this paper, we investigate the role of redundancy in providing QoS assurance for cellular connectivity for CCs. Using our bespoke Android measurement app, we did a drive-through test on 380 kilometers of major and minor roads in South East England. We measured round trip times, jitter, page load times, packet loss, network type, uplink speed and downlink speeds on the four UK networks for 14 UK-centric websites every five minutes. In addition, we did the same measurement using a much more expensive universal SIM card provider that promises to fall back on any of the four UK networks to assure reliability. By comparing actual performance on the best performing network versus the universal SIM, and then projected performance of a two/three/four multi-operator setup, we make three major contributions. First, the use of redundant multi-connectivity, especially if managed by the demand-side, can deliver superior performance (up to 28 percentage points in some cases). Second, despite costing 95x more per GB of data, the universal SIM performed worse than the best performing network except for uplink speed, highlighting how the choice of parameter to monitor can influence operational decisions. Third, any assessment of CC connectivity reliability based on availability is sub-optimal as it can hide significant under-performance.