A Hardware-in-the-Loop Framework for Urban Mobility Scenarios within the 5G Trial in L’Aquila

The revolution brought by the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile network in the telecommunications ecosystem opens the way to innovative applications, bringing out new opportunities to improve both the social and business contexts. There is a great effort worldwide to assess the capabilities of a 5G network and the city of L’Aquila is involved in the Italian initiative coordinated by the Ministry of Economic Development (MISE). One of the six use cases identified concerns connected vehicles and evolved mobility applications; two vehicles will be equipped with 5G terminals and used in the field trials. To obtain an environment closer to the real one while containing the monetary costs of the deployment, a hybrid solution that integrates a simulator of urban mobility with the Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) approach has been adopted. In this work a description of the mobility use case and of the trial setup will be provided along with an insight into the application of the HIL technique to the ITS environment; finally, an overview on the Artificial Intelligence methods that can be exploited to identify and predict road traffic critical situations is given.