Exploiting Mobility Context Awareness in Cellular Networks for Assisting Vehicular Use Cases

Mobile communication has become one of the key technologies in contemporary world which is on the verge of its fifth generation (5G). In parallel, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is an emerging sector whose focus is safe, smart and efficient transportation. In recent years, various vehicular use cases are studied within the scope of cellular networks, to provide reliable and low latency services as required. With contemporary advancements such as Mobile Edge Clouds (MEC), ability of cellular networks to support vehicular use cases with low latency requirements (e.g., platooning of vehicles) has also increased. In this work, mobility context awareness is built in a cellular network and is subsequently exploited to assist migration of service or application that is being used by vehicular use case (e.g., vehicular platoon). Further, solutions based on Cooperative Multi-Point transmission (CoMP) and sidelink transmission are proposed to be used in tandem with service migration, to reduce data/service interruption that would arise due to high mobility of vehicles (e.g., handovers (HO)). Message sequence charts are also presented for aforementioned solutions and functional framework is presented for inspected vehicular scenario. Simulation and analysis show the potential of proposed mobility context awareness schemes in assisting service migration among MECs in timely fashion and reducing amount of data transfer and data interruption times, for considered vehicular use case.