by James E. Carroll
Far EasTone, a mobile operator in Taiwan, has delivered a 5G Smart Patrol Car solution for the Kaohsiung City police department to support license plate recognition for tracking stolen cars.
The solution leverages Ericsson’s end-to-end 5G network slicing technology, including 5G Core and RAN Slicing utilizing Dynamic Radio Resource Partitioning in a live 5G Standalone (SA) network. The pioneering use case demonstrates advanced 5G capability to enable mission-critical applications for the public sector, marking another milestone in the two companies’ 20 years of strategic partnership.
With high data throughput and low latency guaranteed by Ericsson’s end-to-end 5G network slicing technology, the data from moving patrol cars can be transmitted in real-time, allowing for the immediate recognition of these license plates being sighted by the device.
As police patrol cars will be constantly on the move, Ericsson’s Dynamic Radio Resource Partitioning, a feature of 5G RAN Slicing, plays an essential role in the solution by optimizing radio resources, strengthening end-to-end slicing capabilities for dynamic resource management, and orchestration while securing required performance level for multiple services.
In addition, the 5G Smart Patrol Car solution uses Ericsson Local Packet Gateway, an edge user plane with small footprint, to connect each equipped car to a regional site for each city for data processing without installing a system on every single car.
Chee Ching, President of Far EasTone Telecommunications, says: “We are thrilled to achieve another 5G milestone with Ericsson by creating the very first network slicing use case in a live 5G standalone network in Taiwan. The 5G Smart Patrol Car is made possible by our continuous investment in big data, AI and IoT, combining with Ericsson top-notch 5G technology and the great support from Kaohsiung City Police Department. ”
David Chou, President of Ericsson Taiwan, says: “Network slicing enables communications service providers to offer innovative services to enter new markets. By creating and operating end-to-end logical networks on top of a shared infrastructure, network slicing can provide tailored services with different requirements on speed, latency and reliability for various use cases, with its full potential only made possible through 5G Standalone. We expect this collaboration will simplify the 5G Smart Patrol Car setup and provide ease of maintenance and operations. Ericsson’s network slicing technology addresses further 5G business opportunities with full flexibility.”
In December 2022, Ericsson, Japanese operator KDDI, and Sony carried out a proof-of-concept (POC) showing end-to-end network across two simultaneous slices for the same user equipment and the same end-user service. In this PoC, Ericsson’s 5G Core equipment and Sony’s 5G SA mobile devices applied User Equipment Route Selection Policies (URSP) standards and Priority Scheduling to enable a gaming app to use two different network slices – one for video and one for mobile operation signals. This showed that dedicated network slices can be used for different processes on a mobile device by changing the terminal’s route selection policies in response to a request from 5G core equipment.
Also of interest, during the Grand Prix in Singapore in October 2022, Singtel employed Ericsson’s Dynamic Radio Resource Partitioning feature to deliver end-to-end network slicing in a live 5G Standalone network to power 5G experiences and festivities along the Marina Bay Street Circuit. Ericsson’s end-to-end network slicing solution also included cloud-native capabilities to create a dedicated slice of its network that was reserved for subscribers of Sports Plus on Singtel’s app marketplace, CAST.