LTE4V2X - impact of high mobility in highway scenarios

In the near future, most new vehicles will be equipped with short-range radios capable to communicate with other vehicles or with roadside infrastructure. These new networks known as vehicular networks are seen to be one of the most valuable concept for improving road safety and transport efficiency, and as a key technology enabling the provisioning of value-added services to passengers and drivers. Vehicular networks raise a number of unique challenges due to the extremely dynamic network topology and the highly variable number of mobile nodes. To overcome these problems, an effective solution is to organize the network in a way which will facilitate the management tasks and permit to deploy a wide panoply of applications such as urban sensing applications. In a recent work [1], we proposed LTE4V2X, a novel framework for a centralized vehicular network organization using LTE. In the continuity to this work, this paper presents new performances evaluation of LTE4V2X in highway scenarios in order to evaluate the impact of high mobility. We studied its performances against a decentralized organization protocol and All-LTE protocol for a well known urban sensing application, Floating Car Data (FCD) application. We analyze the performances of LTE4V2X using NS-3 simulation environment and a realistic highway mobility model. We also analyze analytically the impact of the handover on the performances. The results show that LTE4V2X can handle efficiently high vehicles' velocities and leads to performance improvement by lowering the overhead induced by control messages, reducing the FCD packet losses, as well as enhancing LTE bandwidth usage.