The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) has released a broad agency announcement (BAA) (693JJ3-20-BAA-0002) to procure vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications devices to support the USDOT’s 5.9 GHz "Safety Band" spectrum testing. (Earlier post.) The devices will be used to evaluate the safety performance and capabilities of the devices through both small- and large-scale testing, including scalability and congestion, interoperability, and complex transportation scenarios.

Using the 5.9 GHz Safety Band spectrum, the USDOT is testing whether LTE-C-V2X, dual-mode DSRC/C-V2X, and/or 5G new radio (NR) technologies can meet the requirements for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety-of-life and public safety systems, as well as whether they can perform potential interactions with existing technologies that currently support the 5.9 GHz Safety Band.

Based on evolving industry standards, there is a need to assess the commercially available off-the-shelf and prototype devices to determine if there is uninterrupted and seamless advancement toward transportation safety.

Assessment of V2X technologies for safety, system efficiency, and mobility; and assessment of the safest and most efficient use of allocated spectrum to accommodate transportation needs requires transparent, comprehensive, and repeatable test results that assure that the technologies work under normal as well as varying traffic conditions that create “edge-use” cases.

USDOT finds that the ability to achieve these results is to complete testing and use the data and results to inform decisions. US DOT seeks the following devices to pursue professional test track and real-world conditions testing in 2020:

• Long Term Evolution-Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (LTE-C-V2X based on the 3GPP LTE specifications and the emerging SAE J3016 standard) devices

• Dual-mode DSRC and LTE-C-V2X devices

• 5G New Radio (5G NR) devices

The USDOT’s Test Framework consists of several phases, test metrics, test procedures, and parallel planning test schedules. The USDOT’s Test Framework will require the purchase of multiple rounds of devices over the period of performance.

An ideal test schedule would subscribe to testing LTE-C-V2X, Dual mode DSRC and LTE-C-V2X, and 5G NR devices in parallel. However, the USDOT has recognized that the three types of devices are at different maturity levels of design, prototype, and production. Therefore, the USDOT anticipates acquiring a minimum of 250 COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) devices (i.e., production-ready devices) from different vendors to conduct field testing; the USDOT anticipates acquiring small values of prototypes based on the vendor’s availability of devices.

Responses are due on 19 March 2020.