Benchmarking the Performance of 5G CV2X for Connected Vehicles based Adaptive Traffic Signal

Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) is an improvement over fixed timing-based or sensor-based signal management. Having real-time learning-based adaptive signals that can optimize the timings of the signal phases of the intersection reduces waiting time and emissions. However, connected vehicles-based adaptive traffic signal requires a large amount of data to be exchanged between vehicles and the infrastructure. Cellular Vehicle to Everything (CV2X) enables us to build adaptive traffic signals using connected vehicle data. In this paper, we investigate the performance of 5G CV2X for an adaptive traffic signal as well as for wireless signaling of traffic signal status using the 5.9 GHz ITS band and 24 GHz mmWave. Our results indicate that 5G CV2X with 5.9 GHz frequency is capable of supporting CV2X-based adaptive traffic signals in heavy vehicular traffic with an average delay of about 4.25 ms for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, 2.03 ms for infrastructure-to-vehicle communication and 42.71 ms for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Using 24 GHz mmWave further reduces the communication delay to the sub-millisecond range. Nevertheless, the performance gain is at the cost of additional infrastructure due to mmWave’s shorter range.