Apple wants ‘Apple Cars’ to be able to ‘talk’ with each other, iPhones, Apple Watches, etc.

Apple has filed for a patent (number 20210160817) for “optimized resource selection procedures in vehicle-to-vehicle communications” that shows that the rumored “Apple Cars” could communicate with each other, iPhones, and Apple Watches

On the other hand, the patent filing could simply involve future features in CarPlay devices. CarPlay provides a simplified way to use your iPhone interface on a car’s touch screen, giving users access to Siri voice controls, as well as Apple Maps, Apple Music, Phone, Messages, and a variety of third party apps. 

Either way the patent filing involves vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications —  automobile technologies designed to allow automobiles to communicate with each other and with other devices (e.g., pedestrian smartphones and traffic lights). Apple says these technologies have the potential to redefine transportation by providing real-time, highly reliable, and actionable information flows to enable safety, mobility and environmental applications. Additionally, these techniques may pave the way to connected and automated driving (CAD). 

Devices participating in a V2V system may need to acquire appropriate resources, such as frequency resources, to communicate with one another. Resource selection can potentially be performed with assistance from a cellular base station or autonomously (e.g., without assistance from a base station). Apple says that autonomous mode operation may be necessary as cellular network coverage cannot be guaranteed for all geographic locations through which vehicles may travel. 

Apple says this means the ability for vehicles (or other devices) to autonomously implement, in an ad-hoc manner, resource selection (e.g., to appropriately distribute frequency resources to devices in a particular area) can be critical to successful deployment of V2V technologies. 

Here’s the summary of the patent filing: “Selection of time-frequency resources, for autonomous mode operation of V2V UEs, may be performed based on measurements of power transmitted by other UEs and received sidelink control information (SCI) transmitted by the other UEs. Based on these measurements, the UE may selectively exclude spectrum resources, from the set of possible resources, to obtain a final set of resources from which the UE may select resources to use for transmitting. In some implementations, the exclusion of the resources may be based on an iterative operation in which a power threshold value is incrementally modified until a candidate number of resources are available. Additionally, in some implementations, UE priority assignments may be used to obtain the power threshold value for a particular UE.”