Vanetza-NAP: Vehicular Communications and Services in MicroServices Architectures

Vehicle-to-everything represents a major step in the evolution of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), by allowing connected and automated vehicles, and the infrastructure, to share information seamlessly. Vehicular use cases with reduced latency in data processing and transmission require the utilisation of Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC). VEC needs to integrate ITS services comprising communication architectures and message formats that are accessible and efficient, and ensure timing constraints. For this purpose, this paper discusses some of the issues present in current vehicular protocol stack, and proposes Vanetza-NAP, an open-source microservice architecture for ITS-G5 communications. Vanetza-NAP adds new features to Vanetza and support for: (1) new ITS message types, (2) runtime config-uration mechanisms that facilitate orchestration, (3) parallelised design to handle multiple messages simultaneously, and (4) integrated messaging technologies to connect with applications (MQTT and DDS). An evaluation is performed to the new architecture, by measuring the delay introduced by different messaging technologies, the impact of the parallelized design, and the overhead of the microservice-oriented approach. The results demonstrate the benefit of the parallelized implementation and priority-based message queuing. The enhanced interoperability and extended capabilities introduced justifies the small overhead in delay to support the microservice-based edge architecture.