Multiple Access in Cellular V2X: Performance Analysis in Highly Congested Vehicular Networks

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication enables vehicles, roadside vulnerable users, and infrastructure facilities to communicate in an ad-hoc fashion. Cellular V2X (C-V2X), which was introduced in the 3
^rd
generation partnership project (3GPP) release 14 standard, has recently received significant attention due to its perceived ability to address the scalability and reliability requirements of vehicular safety applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the resource allocation of the C-V2X multiple access mechanism for high-density vehicular networks, as it can strongly impact the key performance indicators such as latency and packet delivery rate. Phenomena that can affect the communication performance are investigated and a detailed analysis of the cases that can cause possible performance degradation or system limitations, is provided. The results indicate that a unified system configuration may be necessary for all vehicles, as it is mandated for IEEE 802.11p, in order to obtain the optimum performance. In the end, we show the inter-dependence of different parameters on the resource allocation procedure with the aid of our high fidelity simulator.