Next-generation Vehicular Networks Research Articles

Microservice-Based Vehicular Network for Seamless and Ultra-Reliable Communications of Connected Vehicles

The fifth-generation (5G) cellular infrastructure is expected to bring about the widespread use of connected vehicles. This technological progress marks the beginning of a new era in vehicular networks, which includes a range of different types and services of self-driving cars and the smooth sharing of information between vehicles. Connected vehicles have also been announced as a main use case of the sixth-generation (6G) cellular, with ultimate requirements beyond the 5G (B5G) and 6G eras. These networks require full coverage, extremely high reliability and availability, very low latency, and significant system adaptability. The significant specifications set for vehicular networks pose considerable design and development challenges. The goals of establishing a latency of 1 millisecond, effectively handling large amounts of data traffic, and facilitating high-speed mobility are of utmost importance. To address these difficulties and meet the demands of upcoming networks, e.g., 6G, it is necessary to improve the performance of vehicle networks by incorporating innovative technology into existing network structures. This work presents significant enhancements to vehicular networks to fulfill the demanding specifications by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies, including distributed edge computing, e.g., mobile edge computing (MEC) and fog computing, software-defined networking (SDN), and microservice. The work provides a novel vehicular network structure based on micro-services architecture that meets the requirements of 6G networks. The required offloading scheme is introduced, and a handover algorithm is presented to provide seamless communication over the network. Moreover, a migration scheme for migrating data between edge servers was developed. The work was evaluated in terms of latency, availability, and reliability. The results outperformed existing traditional approaches, demonstrating the potential of our approach to meet the demanding requirements of next-generation vehicular networks.

A Survey on Video Streaming for Next-Generation Vehicular Networks

As assisted driving technology advances and vehicle entertainment systems rapidly develop, future vehicles will become mobile cinemas, where passengers can use various multimedia applications in the car. In recent years, the progress in multimedia technology has given rise to immersive video experiences. In addition to conventional 2D videos, 360° videos are gaining popularity, and volumetric videos, which can offer users a better immersive experience, have been discussed. However, these applications place high demands on network capabilities, leading to a dependence on next-generation wireless communication technology to address network bottlenecks. Therefore, this study provides an exhaustive overview of the latest advancements in video streaming over vehicular networks. First, we introduce related work and background knowledge, and provide an overview of recent developments in vehicular networking and video types. Next, we detail various video processing technologies, including the latest released standards. Detailed explanations are provided for network strategies and wireless communication technologies that can optimize video transmission in vehicular networks, paying special attention to the relevant literature regarding the current development of 6G technology that is applied to vehicle communication. Finally, we proposed future research directions and challenges. Building upon the technologies introduced in this paper and considering diverse applications, we suggest a suitable vehicular network architecture for next-generation video transmission.

NextGenV2V: Authenticated V2V communication for next generation vehicular network using (2, n)-threshold scheme

Securing end-to-end communication in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) is crucial due to zero trust between the communicating entities. Additionally, the underlying communication needs to be lightweight in many cases, especially when vehicles are moving at high speeds or deploying applications like Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSN) and next-generation vehicular networks with densely deployed small-cells and micro-cells. The traditional VANET facilitates two types of communication: Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication to establish trust between a Vehicle User (Vi) and roadside infrastructure, followed by Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication for information exchange. Unlike existing protocols that encounter security issues and high authentication delay as they require communication with a Trusted Authority (TA) every time Vi needs authentication or re-authentication, we present a symmetric key-based an authenticated V2V communication for next generation vehicular network using (2, n)-threshold scheme, called NextGenV2V. In NextGenV2V, authentication of a newly visited Vi is performed with the help of TA, but re-authentication of a pre-authenticated Vi is done without the support of TA. This significantly reduces communication overhead during re-authentication and improves the overall authentication delay. NextGenV2V is designed in such a way that at least 2 out of n registered vehicle users must cooperate to compute a shared secret key. This feature ensures improved security, as attackers cannot breach the system’s security unless two or more vehicles are compromised. Furthermore, considering that an attacker cannot physically be present in more than one location simultaneously, the system’s security remains intact even if a current vehicle is compromised. The proposed protocol is also verified to resist known security attacks, both formally and informally. To demonstrate the effectiveness of NextGenV2V, a comparative performance analysis is presented that proves its suitability for next-generation vehicular networks.

An Adaptive Bandwidth Management Algorithm for Next-Generation Vehicular Networks.

The popularity of video services such as video call or video on-demand has made it impossible for people to live without them in their daily lives. It can be anticipated that the explosive growth of vehicular communication owing to the widespread use of in-vehicle video infotainment applications in the future will result in increasing fragmentation and congestion of the wireless transmission spectrum. Accordingly, effective bandwidth management algorithms are demanded to achieve efficient communication and stable scalability in next-generation vehicular networks. To the best of our current knowledge, a noticeable gap remains in the existing literature regarding the application of the latest advancements in network communication technologies. Specifically, this gap is evident in the lack of exploration regarding how cutting-edge technologies can be effectively employed to optimize bandwidth allocation, especially in the realm of video service applications within the forthcoming vehicular networks. In light of this void, this paper presents a seamless integration of cutting-edge 6G communication technologies, such as terahertz (THz) and visible light communication (VLC), with the existing 5G millimeter-wave and sub-6 GHz base stations. This integration facilitates the creation of a network environment characterized by high transmission rates and extensive coverage. Our primary aim is to ensure the uninterrupted playback of real-time video applications for vehicle users. These video applications encompass video conferencing, live video, and on-demand video services. The outcomes of our simulations convincingly indicate that the proposed strategy adeptly addresses the challenge of bandwidth competition among vehicle users. Moreover, it notably boosts the efficient utilization of bandwidth from less crowded base stations, optimizes the fulfillment of bandwidth prerequisites for various video applications, and elevates the overall video quality experienced by users. Consequently, our findings serve as a successful validation of the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Toward the Age of Intelligent Vehicular Networks for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in 6G

Twenty-two years after the advent of the firstgeneration vehicular network, i.e., dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) standard/IEEE 802.11p, the vehicular technology market has become very competitive with a new player, Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X). Currently, C-V2X technology likely dominates the race because of the big advantages of comprehensive coverage and high throughput/reliability. Meanwhile, DSRC-based technologies are struggling to survive and rebound with many hopes betting on success of the secondgeneration standard, IEEE P802.11bd. While the standards battle to attract automotive makers and dominate the commercial market landing, the research community has started thinking about the shape of the next-generation vehicular networks. This article details the state-of-the-art progress of vehicular networks, particularly the cellular V2X-related technologies in specific use cases, compared to the features of the current generation. Through the typical examples, we also highlight why 5G is inadequate to provide the best connectivity for the vehicular applications and then 6G technologies can fill up the vacancy.

Learning-Based Resource Allocation for Backscatter-Aided Vehicular Networks

Heterogeneous backscatter networks are emerging as a promising solution to address the proliferating coverage and capacity demands of next-generation vehicular networks. However, despite its rapid evolution and significance, the optimization aspect of such networks has been overlooked due to their complexity and scale. Motivated by this discrepancy in the literature, this work sheds light on a novel learning-based optimization framework for heterogeneous backscatter vehicular networks. More specifically, the article presents a resource allocation and user association scheme for large-scale heterogeneous backscatter vehicular networks by considering a collaboration centric spectrum sharing mechanism. In the considered network setup, multiple network service providers (NSPs) own the resources to serve several legacy and backscatter vehicular users in the network. For each NSP, the legacy vehicle user operates under the macro cell, whereas, the backscatter vehicle user operates under small private cells using leased spectrum resources. A joint power allocation, user association, and spectrum sharing problem has been formulated with an objective to maximize the utility of NSPs. In order to overcome challenges of high dimensionality and non-convexity, the problem is divided into two subproblems. Subsequently, a reinforcement learning and a supervised deep learning approach have been used to solve both subproblems in an efficient and effective manner. To evaluate the benefits of the proposed scheme, extensive simulation studies are conducted and a comparison is provided with benchmark techniques. The performance evaluation demonstrates the utility of the presented system architecture and learning-based optimization framework.

A Novel Contract Theory-Based Incentive Mechanism for Cooperative Task-Offloading in Electrical Vehicular Networks

The proliferation of compute-intensive services in next-generation vehicular networks will impose an unprecedented computation demand to meet stringent latency and resource requirements. Vehicular edge or fog computing has been a widely adopted solution to enhance the computational capacity of vehicular networks; however, the computation requirements of these compute hungry applications will surpass the capabilities of such a solution. To address this challenge, the on-board resources of neighboring mobile vehicles can be utilized. However, such resource utilization requires an incentive mechanism to motivate privately owned neighboring vehicles to participate in sharing their resources. In this paper, we propose a contract theory-based incentive mechanism that maximizes the social welfare of the vehicular networks by motivating neighboring vehicles to participate in sharing their resources. The proposed approach enables the Road Side Units (RSUs) to provide appropriate rewards by offering a tailored contract to each resource sharing vehicle based on their contribution and unique characteristics. Moreover, we derive an optimal contract scheme for computational task offloading, taking into account the individual rationality and incentive-compatible constraints. Finally, we perform numerical evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. The proposed scheme achieves up to 28% higher computing resource utilization, 17.2% lower energy consumption per computing resource utilization, and 17.1% lesser energy consumption per task completed when compared to the linear pricing incentive baseline.

Mobility and Blockage-Aware Communications in Millimeter-Wave Vehicular Networks

Mobility may degrade the performance of next-generation vehicular networks operating at the millimeter-wave spectrum: frequent mis-alignment and blockages require repeated beam training and handover, and incur enormous overhead. Nevertheless, mobility induces temporal correlations in the communication beams and in blockage events. In this paper, an adaptive design of beam training, data transmission and handover is proposed, that learns and exploits these temporal correlations to reduce the beam training overhead and optimally trade-off throughput and power consumption. At each time-slot, the serving base station (BS) decides to perform either beam training, data communication, or handover when blockage is detected, under uncertainty in the system state. The decision problem is cast as a partially observable Markov decision process, and the goal is to maximize the throughput delivered to the UE, under an average power constraint. To address the high dimensional optimization, an approximate constrained point-based value iteration (C-PBVI) method is developed, which simultaneously optimizes the primal and dual functions to meet the power constraint. Numerical results demonstrate a good match between the analysis and a simulation based on 2D mobility and 3D analog beamforming via uniform planar arrays at both BSs and UE, and reveal that C-PBVI performs near-optimally, and outperforms a baseline scheme with periodic beam training by 38% in spectral efficiency. Motivated by the structure of the C-PBVI policy, two heuristics are proposed, that trade complexity with sub-optimality, and achieve only 4% and 15% loss in spectral efficiency.

Software Defined Network-Based Multi-Access Edge Framework for Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks aim to support cooperative warning applications that involve the dissemination of warning messages to reach vehicles in a target area. Due to the high mobility of vehicles, imperative technologies such as software-defined network (SDN) and edge computing (EC) have been proposed for the next-generation vehicular networks. The SDN separates the control plane from data plane entities and executes the control plane software on general purpose hardware. On the other hand, EC aims to reduce the network latency and packet loss rate by pushing the computations to the edge of the network. Nevertheless, the current solutions that integrate SDN and EC could not satisfy the latency requirements for data dissemination of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. To bridge the gap between the two technologies, the conventional EC is enhanced to multi-access edge computing (MEC) by collocating the edge computing servers with the radio access networks. In order to improve the latency for V2X services, we propose in this paper, an SDN-based multi-access edge computing framework for the vehicular networks (SDMEV). In the proposed solution, two main algorithms are implemented. First, a fuzzy logic-based algorithm is used to select the head vehicle for each evolved node B (eNB) collocated with road-side unit (RSU) for the purpose of grouping vehicles based on their communication interfaces. Afterward, an OpenFlow algorithm is deployed to update flow tables of forwarding devices at forwarding layers. In addition, a case study is presented and evaluated using the object-oriented modular discrete event network (OMNeT++) simulation framework which includes the INET framework-based SDN. Simulation results depict that the data dissemination based-SDN supported by multi-access edge computing over SDMEV can improve the latency requirements for V2X services.

Cache-Aided Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

The increasing demand for rich multimedia services and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) pose challenging requirements for the next-generation vehicular networks. Such challenges are largely related to high spectral efficiency and low latency requirements in the context of massive content delivery and increased connectivity. In this respect, caching and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) paradigms have been recently proposed as potential solutions to effectively address some of these key challenges. In this paper, we introduce cache-aided NOMA as an enabling technology for vehicular networks. In this context, we first consider the full file caching case, where each vehicle caches and requests entire files using the NOMA principle. Without loss of generality, we consider a two-user vehicular network communication scenario under double Nakagami $\text{-}m$ fading conditions and propose an optimum power allocation policy. To this end, an optimization problem that maximizes the overall probability of successful decoding of files at each vehicle is formulated and solved. Furthermore, we consider the case of split file caching, where each file is divided into two parts. A joint power allocation optimization problem is formulated, where power allocation across vehicles and cached split files is investigated. The offered analytic results are corroborated by extensive results from computer simulations and interesting insights are developed. Indicatively, it is shown that the proposed caching-aided NOMA outperforms the conventional NOMA technique.

Millimetre‐wave massive MIMO for cellular vehicle‐to‐infrastructure communication

Autonomous driving is delightedly an innovative and revolutionary paradigm for future intelligent transport systems. To be fully functional and efficient, vehicles will use hundreds of sensors and generate terabytes of data that will be used and shared for safety, infotainment and allied services. Communication among vehicles or between vehicle and infrastructure thus requires data rate, latency and reliability far beyond what the legacy dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) systems can support. In this work, the authors motivate the use of millimetre-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to facilitate gigabits-per-second (Gbps) communication for cellular vehicle-to-infrastructure scenarios. As a fundamental component, the authors characterise the mmWave massive MIMO vehicular channel using metrics such as path loss, root-mean-square delay spread, Rician K -factor, cluster and ray distribution, power delay profile, channel rank and condition number as well as data rate. They compare the mmWave performance with the DSRC and LTE-A capabilities, and offer useful insights on vehicular channels. The results show that mmWave massive MIMO can deliver Gbps data rates for next-generation vehicular networks.

Resource Allocation Algorithm With Multi-Platform Intelligent Offloading in D2D-Enabled Vehicular Networks

The latest research of network and computing contributes greatly to the development of vehicular networks. However, in existing works, these two important enabling technologies are studied separately. To reduce the delay, in this paper, we propose a multi-platform intelligent offloading and resource allocation algorithm which can dynamically organize the computing resources to improve the performance of the next-generation vehicular networks. Considering the task calculation problem, the K-nearest neighbor algorithm is used to select the task offloading platform (i.e., cloud computing, mobile edge computing, or local computing). For the computational resource allocation problem and system complexity in non-local computing, reinforcement learning is used to solve the optimization problem of resource allocation. The simulation results show that compared with the baseline algorithm that all tasks are offloaded to the local or mobile edge computing server, the resource allocation scheme achieves a significant reduction in latency cost, and the average system cost can be saved by 80%.

Full-duplex radios for vehicular communications

Recent significant advances in self-interference cancellation techniques pave the way for the deployment of full-duplex wireless transceivers capable of concurrent transmission and reception on the same channel. Despite the promise to theoretically double the spectrum efficiency, full-duplex prototyping in off-the-shelf chips of mobile devices is still in its infancy, mainly because of the challenges in mitigating self-interference to a tolerable level and the strict hardware constraints. In this article, we argue in favor of embedding full-duplex radios in onboard units of future vehicles. Unlike the majority of mobile devices, vehicular onboard units are good candidates to host complex full-duplex transceivers because of their virtually unlimited power supply and processing capacity. Taking into account the effect of imperfect self-interference cancellation, we investigate the design implications of full-duplex devices at the higher-layer protocols of next-generation vehicular networks and highlight the benefits they could bring with respect to half-duplex devices in some representative use cases. Early results are also provided that give insight into the impact of self-interference cancellation on vehicle-to-roadside communications, and showcase the benefits of FD-enhanced medium access control protocols for vehicle-to-vehicle communications supporting crucial road safety applications.