A 5G-Based Vehicular Network Architecture to Enhance Road Safety Applications

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) architecture is under research and development over the last two decades. The major challenge in developing a VANET architecture is how to satisfy the diverse safety application requirements in terms of latency, scalability, and dynamic network topology. Different VANET clustering schemes have been proposed to meet various road safety applications that operate in different road traffic scenarios. However, these solutions often fail to cope with the dynamic VANET topology, where communication networks need to adapt with topology variations. The key challenge is how to form a stable cluster for different road types such as highway with many entries and exit points, city roads with roundabouts, variable speed zones, shared roads, etc. In this paper, we focus on developing a 5G-based low delay communication network to enhance road safety applications. To deal with different road structures, we propose to further enhance our previously published multihop communication protocol, also known as the Clustered Multi-hop Multicast Protocol (CMMP) and developed a new Prediction-Based Update, Monitoring and Joining (PUMJ) algorithm referred to as the PB-CMMP protocol to improve the reliability of the DENM transmissions. We also develop an OMNET++/Simu5GNeins/SUMO-based simulation model to analyze the performance of the proposed algorithms and compare the obtained results with existing algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed PUMJ technique, combined with the CMMP protocol, significantly enhances the VANET's performance compared to existing solutions.