LTE Network Enhancement for Vehicular Safety Communication

Abstract

Direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications have been popularly considered for safe driving of manned or unmanned vehicles. The V2I communication is better than the V2V communication for propagating safety messages at critical regions like intersections where the safety messages must be delivered to surround vehicles with low latency and loss, since transmitters as infrastructure can have line of sight to the receiver vehicles and control wireless medium access in a centralized manner unlike V2V. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks are rapidly deployed in the world with explosively increasing mobile traffic. As many automobile manufacturers choose LTE on-board devices for telematics, the LTE system can be utilized also for safety purposes instead of 802.11p/WAVE based roadside units (RSUs). Previous literatures have studied mostly current LTE system analysis in aspect of theoretical network capacity and end-to-end delay to investigate feasibility of V2I communication. In this paper, we propose new enhancement of a current LTE system specified by 3rd-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE standards while addressing major delay challenges. From simulation, we confirm that our three key solutions can reduce end-to-end delay effectively in the LTE system to satisfy requirements of safety message delivery.