This work presents a potential solution for enabling the use of multicast in the 5G New Radio Release 17, called 5G NR Mixed Mode. The proposed multicast/broadcast mode follows one of the two approaches envisaged in 3GPP, which enables a dynamic and seamless switching between unicast and multicast, both in the downlink and the uplink. This paper also provides a performance evaluation of several IMT-2020 KPIs, including available data rate and spectral efficiency, user and control plane latencies, energy efficiency, and mobility, highlighting the potential advantages of this solution over unicast in relevant scenarios. Finally, other multipoint–based KPIs such as coverage or packet loss rate are also evaluated by means of system level simulations.

5G Mixed Mode: NR Multicast-Broadcast Services

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) enhanced Multicast Broadcast Multimedia Service (eMBMS) a set of new features to support the distribution of Terrestrial Broadcast services in Release 14. On the other hand, a new 5th Generation (5G) system architecture and radio access technology, 5G New Radio (NR), are being standardized from Release 15 onwards, which so far have only focused on unicast connectivity. This may change in Release 17 given a new Work Item set to specify basic Radio Access Network (RAN) functionalities for the provision of multicast/broadcast communications for NR. This work initially excludes some of the functionalities originally supported for Terrestrial Broadcast services under LTE, e.g., free to air, receive-only mode, large-area single frequency networks, etc. This paper proposes an enhanced Next Generation RAN architecture based on 3GPP Release 15 with a series of architectural and functional enhancements, to support an efficient, flexible and dynamic selection between unicast and multicast/broadcast transmission modes and also the delivery of Terrestrial Broadcast services. The paper elaborates on the Cloud-RAN based architecture and proposes new concepts such as the RAN Broadcast/Multicast Areas that allows a more flexible deployment in comparison to eMBMS. High-level assessment methodologies including complexity analysis and inspection are used to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed architecture design and compare it with the 3GPP architectural requirements.

5G Radio Access Network Architecture for Terrestrial Broadcast Services

Urbanization causes many problems to human mobility, since people living in the cities tend to increase the vehicular traffic flow. City road infrastructure does not increase faster than the number of vehicles, thus causing traffic congestion in dense urban centers. Besides travel delay, vehicular traffic congestion results in serious problems to human beings (e.g., health problems due to stress), to the planet (e.g., increase in pollution) and to the economy (e.g., waste of a large amount of money due to time spent in traffic jams). In order to improve vehicular traffic flow in dense urban areas, this paper presents a new Vehicular Traffic Management Service based on Traffic Engineering theory, called Re-RouTE. The Re-RouTE service relies on the density of vehicles in roads and applies the flow-density macroscopic traffic engineering model to identify congested routes. Roads are represented by a weighted graph, which is then used to discover routes without traffic jams and with a small increase in the travel distance. The main goal of Re-RouTE is to reduce traffic jams while increasing the global vehicular traffic flow of the road network. Moreover, the service was designed to reduce traffic jams instead of moving them to a different road/area. Simulation results show the ability of Re-RouTE to improve travel time, travel distance, speed and the number of messages transmitted when compared to a literature solution.

/pdf/vehicular-traffic-management-based-on-traffic-engineering-invj3995rs.pdf

Vehicular Traffic Management Based on Traffic Engineering for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile environments, with the help of larger bandwidths and cloud computing solutions, any task can be offloaded from a mobile user equipment to be handled remotely. However, even though this process is accelerated with every cellular generation, with 5G being no exception, offloading to a faraway centralized cloud implies non-negligible delay. To tackle this issue concerning delay-sensitive applications, mobile edge computing, now denominated as multi-access edge computing (MEC), was brought to light. With cloud resources brought closer to the edge of the network, MEC greatly reduces task offloading delay, thereby striving to satisfy the constraints of real-time applications. As highly demanding mobile applications, vehicular networks are a target to be addressed in terms of performance, especially communication and computation delay. In this article, we establish the specificities of MEC when applied to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and survey recent papers studying implementations of MEC relevant to real-time vehicular considerations. We categorize these latest V2X architectures so as to unveil the mechanisms behind their improved performance: network availability and coverage, reliability and loss of network connectivity, large data handling and task offloading. This survey not only provides an initial understanding of the state-of-the-art advancements in the field of MEC-enabled vehicular networks, but also raises open issues and challenges that need to be addressed before enjoying the full benefits of this paradigm. 

Mobile edge computing for V2X architectures and applications: A survey

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks aim to be qualified as the core connectivity infrastructures to address connected automated mobility (CAM), both from a technological and from a business perspective, for the higher automation levels defined by the automotive industry. Specifically, in some territories such as the European Union the cross-border corridors have relevance, as they are the cohesive paths for terrestrial transport. Therefore, 5G for CAM applications is planned to be deployed there first. However, cross-border contexts imply paramount communication challenges, such as seamless roaming, not addressed by current technology. This paper identifies relevant future 5G enhancements, specifically those specified by Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) releases beyond Release 15, and outlines how they will support the ambitions of highly automated driving in cross-border corridors. In order to conduct this study, a set of representative use cases and the related communication requirements were identified. Then, for each use case, the most relevant 5G features were proposed. Some open issues are described at the end.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/22/6622/pdf

5G Beyond 3GPP Release 15 for Connected Automated Mobility in Cross-Border Contexts.

This paper focuses on capabilities enabled by 5G connectivity in the cooperative, connected and autonomous cars, and elaborates on two technical enablers. One of the technical enablers consists of a beamformed broadcast/multicast technology that builds on adaptive and robust beam management techniques at the air interface. The other proposed technical component aims to improve the end-to-end architectural design of 5G networks to enable efficient broadcast and multicast transmissions for vehicle-to-anything services. Finally, the key results of multicast and broadcast technical components are described and ongoing and future areas of work and research are detailed.

Sylvain Allio

Papers

Multicast and Broadcast Enablers for High-Performing Cellular V2X Systems