Cell-Less Communications in 5G Vehicular Networks Based on Vehicle-Installed Access Points

The development of intelligent transportation systems brings many requirements to the current vehicular networks. For instance, to ensure secure communications between vehicles, low latency, high connectivity, and high data rate are required for vehicular networks. To meet such requirements, the 5G communication systems for vehicular networks should be improved accordingly. This article proposes a communication scheme for 5G vehicular networks, in which moving access points are deployed on vehicles to facilitate the access of vehicle users. Moreover, adjacent vehicle- installed moving access points may cooperatively communicate with vehicle users by joint transmission and reception. In this way, vehicle users communicate with one or more unspecified cooperative access points in a cell-less manner instead of being associated with a single access point. To manage such cell-less networks, local moving software-defined cloudlets are adopted to perform transmission and scheduling management. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces latency while improving the connectivity of vehicular networks, and can be considered as a research direction for the solution to 5G vehicular networks.