Empowering the Internet of Vehicles with Multi-RAT 5G Network Slicing

Area of Science:

• Networking and Telecommunications
• Intelligent Transportation Systems
• Internet of Things

Background:

• The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) integrates Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
• Upcoming 5G technologies offer significant potential for IoV advancements.
• Ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic isolation is critical due to diverse IoV devices, applications, and Radio Access Technologies (RATs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the need for advanced networking schemes in IoV by applying 5G network slicing.
• To validate a 5G network slicing framework for IoV in a realistic vehicular scenario.
• To ensure accurate bandwidth control, full flow isolation, and scalability for vehicular critical systems.

Main Methods:

• Development of a distributed Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture.
• Dynamic placement of Virtualised Network Functions (VNFs) for traffic management.
• Integration of heterogeneous radio technologies (cellular and IoT communications).

Main Results:

• Demonstrated accurate bandwidth control and full flow isolation for vehicular critical systems.
• Enabled integration of diverse radio technologies into isolated network slices without compromising Core Network (CN) scalability.
• Achieved short and predictable slice-creation times, guaranteed performance/QoS, and service scalability for up to one million connected devices.

Conclusions:

• The proposed 5G network slicing framework effectively meets the demanding QoS and isolation requirements of IoV.
• The distributed MEC architecture provides flexibility and scalability for dynamic VNF management.
• The solution is validated for realistic vehicular scenarios, supporting heterogeneous networks and large-scale deployments.