Low-Latency Layer-2-Based Multicast Scheme for Localized V2X Communications

Abstract

The long-term evolution multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) infrastructure has been shown to efficiently fulfill the requirements of classical vehicle-to-vehicle services, such as cooperative awareness message and decentralized environmental notification message delivery, which involve the transmission of the same message to a set of destination receivers in close proximity. When targeting autonomous driving applications, related 5G V2X services, such as cooperative collision avoidance (CCA), impose challenging latency and reliability requirements that cannot be generally guaranteed using the current MBMS architecture. In this paper, we propose a low-latency multicast scheme aimed at decreasing the end-to-end (E2E) communication latency. The proposed approach concentrates the multicast network functionalities into the layer-2 of the base stations (BSs) protocol stack, including a message passing between neighboring BSs, to achieve a fast management of multicast groups and a reduction of the communication path through the network infrastructure. The results show that the proposed technique can substantially decrease the E2E latency of conventional MBMS and ensure the correct operation of demanding services, such as CCA moving toward 5G communication systems.