Highways

Ensure stress-free journeys with smart roads and highways

Build a foundation for safe, efficient and sustainable travel with Nokia networking solutions for smart roads.

Our road and highway network infrastructure solutions provide the robust, reliable and future-ready wide area network (WAN) and data center connectivity you need to operate smart roads. They make it easy to use digital technologies such as Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS), vehicle-to-network-to-everything (V2N2X) communications and autonomous vehicles (AVs) to ensure that all road users enjoy stress-free journeys.

You can also rely on our solutions to make sure every application and stakeholder—from local authorities to traffic applications and car manufacturers—can access and consume centralized road data. This data can help drive smart traffic management applications and keep everyone informed about what’s happening on the road.

Why do we need smart roads?

Road and highway systems connect societies and drive economies by helping people and goods move across cities, towns and rural areas. But accidents are still too common. Cars and trucks are key contributors to climate change. And highway travel isn’t as easy as it should be.

The solution is to use cutting-edge technology to make roads smarter. By connecting and harnessing smart road and highway network infrastructure, you can use the power of digitalization, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to make road travel better for everyone.

On this page

Why do we need smart roads
What smart roads need
Advanced smart road applications
Solutions in action
Explore our solutions

Make Vision Zero a reality with C-ITS

Minimize accidents by combining AI-assisted C-ITS with CCTV and V2N2X applications to detect anomalies, enable faster communications about obstacles, interact with vehicles for incident management and continuously monitor road assets.

Reduce carbon emissions with smart traffic management

Make road travel more sustainable by using C-ITS, V2N2X and AVs to enable smart traffic management applications that reduce congestion, prevent unnecessary speed changes, manage highway lanes dynamically and optimize traffic lights.

Simplify travel with smart road services

Deliver better travel experiences by using C-ITS with V2N2X applications to support seamless toll collection, manage electric vehicle (EV) charging and improve communications about road status and parking availability.

1.19 million

lives lost to road accidents worldwide each year (Source: WHO)

4.6 tonnes

of CO2 emitted by the average passenger vehicle annually (Source: US EPA)

6.793 B

gallons of fuel wasted by the US trucking industry due to road congestion in 2021 (Source: ATRI)

55%

of EV charging failures caused by station connectivity failures (Source: Electrification Institute)

What do smart roads need from the network?

New digitalization, automation and AI applications will demand much more from your road communication infrastructure. To meet these demands and realize all the benefits that smart roads and highways can bring, you need a scalable, reliable and flexible WAN and data center network that can:

Connect more ITS equipment and endpoints with a mix of wired and wireless network technologies
Provide multiservice capabilities that can meet the requirements of new applications such as C-ITS and CCTV, legacy services such as SCADA and emergency roadside call system (ERCS), and layer 2 and 3 network connectivity services
Facilitate data exchanges by providing more bandwidth, bigger data centers and a scalable, AI-capable infrastructure
Protect your road communication infrastructure and data from cyber threats with zero-trust security and quantum-safe encryption, providing an open, secure data lake for interactions with your third-party ecosystem.

Use case

Highways England: Deploying an IP/MPLS and ultra-broadband communications network

Evolve your IP/MPLS and optical WAN for advanced smart road applications

Your IP/MPLS WAN already plays a key role in connecting your road and highway network infrastructure and meeting the communication requirements of your mission-critical operations. But it needs to evolve to help you keep costs in check and get full value from smart road applications powered by advanced technologies such as C-ITS, V2N2X, AVs and AI.

Our solutions let you meet these needs with a multiservice IP/MPLS WAN that adapts to the demands of smart road applications with new capabilities such as segment routing, seamless data center connectivity, AI-ready networking and quantum-safe cybersecurity.

With these capabilities, you can bring flexible, robust and secure connectivity to every key part of your operations, including ITS equipment at the roadside, workers in operations centers, and smart road applications and AI workloads in the cloud.

Connect more equipment and digital services with segment routing

Use segment routing to extend your IP/MPLS WAN so you can connect intelligent roadside equipment on a massive scale and add network capabilities to support new digital innovations.

Ease your smart highway journey with OT cloud networking

Enhance the performance of critical smart highway applications such as ITS, data analytics and AI by deploying them in a dedicated operational technology (OT) cloud. An OT cloud ensures that these applications can communicate seamlessly and continuously with roadside assets.

Meet the networking demands of AI workloads

Realize the full potential of AI to enhance road travel with road and highway network infrastructure optimized for the stringent demands of AI workloads. Our solutions help you maintain AI performance with high resiliency and capacity, lossless networking and seamless WAN–AI Integration.

Make your highway network infrastructure quantum-safe

Turn your IP/MPLS and optical WAN into a strong first line of defense against cyber threats with a zero-trust approach and a multilayer defense-in-depth framework that protects your infrastructure, networks and applications. Add encryption based on AES-256 to keep your highway safe from current and future quantum computing threats.