Roadside Unit Hardware Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Roadside Unit Hardware and Infrastructure Sensing Patents
Concentration at the top. The five leading assignees hold 51.6% of all 5,487 records in scope, and the top ten hold 64.6% — this is a field with a short, dominant list of filers rather than a broad field of small players. Annual filings rose from 159 in 2017 to a peak of 869 in 2022, then continued at a high level, with 682 records in 2021 growing to 791 in 2024 — a 16% rise over that three-year span. The 2025 and 2026 figures (2026 partial) will revise upward as publication catches up with filing.
- 1QUALCOMM INC1,605
- 2INTEL CORP381
- 3MEDIATEK SINGAPORE PTE LTD316
- 4MEDIATEK INC270
- 5HUAWEI TECH CO LTD262
See the full roadside unit hardware and infrastructure sensing analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions
Who holds the most patents in roadside unit hardware and infrastructure sensing?
The dataset’s leading assignee holds 1,605 of the 5,487 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place filer at 262 and the tenth-place filer at 117. The field is dominated by mobile-communications and chipset firms rather than traditional traffic-infrastructure vendors, and the top five assignees together account for 51.6% of all records. That concentration means most of the broad wireless-communications claim space around roadside units is already occupied by a handful of filers.
Is patent filing in this area growing or slowing down?
Filing rose from 682 records in 2021 to 791 in 2024, a 16% increase, after an earlier peak of 869 records in 2022. The 2025 and 2026 figures look lower, but publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so those years are still incomplete rather than genuinely down. Based on the last fully reported year, 2024, the trend was still upward, not slowing.
What technology areas are covered by roadside unit hardware patents?
Most records classify under H04W (wireless communication networks), covering 64.0% of the 5,487 records, and H04L (digital information transmission), covering 27.6%. Traffic-control systems (G08G) and radar/positioning (G01S) — the classes closest to the physical infrastructure-sensing use case — cover smaller shares, 13.8% and 12.9% respectively. Because records can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares overlap and add up to more than 100%.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Roadside Unit Hardware and Infrastructure Sensing covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.