Challenges and Solutions for Cellular Based V2X Communications

TLDR

V2X communications aim to improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment, with DSRC already deployed while cellular V2X is attracting growing academic and industry interest. This survey examines LTE and 5G technologies for efficient V2X, outlining motivations, summarizing LTE architecture, and identifying open research questions. The authors review LTE V2X architecture and operating scenarios, analyze challenges such as physical‑layer design, synchronization, MBMS, resource allocation, and security, and survey recent solutions, while also addressing analogous issues and remedies in 5G vehicular networks. The study highlights key challenges in LTE and 5G V2X—ranging from physical‑layer constraints to resource management—and presents proposed solutions that mitigate these issues.

Abstract

A wide variety of works have been conducted in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to enable a variety of applications for road safety, traffic efficiency and passenger infotainment. Although dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) based V2X is already in the deployment phase, cellular based V2X is gaining more interest in academia and industry most recently. This article surveys the existing work and challenges on LTE and 5G to support efficient V2X communications. First, we present the motivations for cellular based V2X communications. Second, we summarize the LTE V2X architecture and operating scenarios being considered. Third, we discuss the challenges in existing LTE for supporting V2X communications such as physical layer structure, synchronization, multimedia broadcast multicast services (MBMS), resource allocation, security and survey the recent solutions to these challenges. We further discuss the challenges and possible solutions for 5G based vehicular communications. Finally, we discuss the open research issues and possible research directions in cellular based vehicular communications.