A Mobile Edge Computing Approach for Vehicle to Everything Communications

Abstract

This paper explores the exploitation of Mobile/Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. Certain V2X applications that aim at improving road safety require reliable and low latency message delivery. As the number of connected vehicles increases, these requirements cannot be satisfied by technologies relying on the IEEE 802.11p standard. Therefore, the exploitation of the 4th generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile networks has been considered. However, despite their widespread use, LTE systems are characterized by high end-to-end latency since the messages have to traverse the core network. MEC addresses this problem by offering computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network closer to the end-users. This paper aims at investigating the benefits MEC may offer toward implementing V2X communications. In this framework, simulation scenarios were examined concerning various V2X use cases implemented employing either LTE or MEC. The simulation results indicate a clear superiority of MEC over LTE, especially in the case of delivering critical data.