Scalable Cellular V2X Solutions: Large-Scale Deployment Challenges of Connected Vehicle Safety Networks

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is expected to accomplish a long-standing goal of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) community to bring connected vehicles to roads on a large scale. A major challenge, and perhaps the biggest hurdle on the path towards this goal, is the scalability issues associated with it, especially when vehicular safety is concerned. As a major stakeholder, Cellular V2X (C-V2X) community, which is based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), has long been trying to research on whether vehicular networks are able to support the safety-critical applications in high-density vehicular scenarios. This paper attempts to answer this question by first presenting an overview on the scalability challenges faced by 3GPP Release 14 Long Term Evolution C-V2X (LTE-V2X) using the PC5 sidelink interface for low and heavy-density traffic scenarios. Next, it demonstrates a series of solutions that address network congestion, packet losses, and other scalability issues associated with LTE-V2X to enable this communication technology for commercial deployment. In addition, a brief survey is provided into 3GPP Release 16 5G New Radio V2X (NR-V2X) that utilizes the NR sidelink interface and works as an evolution of C-V2X towards better performance for V2X communications, including new enhanced V2X (eV2X) scenarios that possess ultra-low-latency and high-reliability requirements.