Controlling WiFi Direct Group Formation for Non-Critical Applications in C-V2X Network

The fifth-generation (5G) networks are expected to meet various communication requirements for vehicles. C-V2X, introduced in LTE V2X in Release 14, is designed to provide ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency performance required by the most demanding V2X applications. In the literature, research interests are primarily focused on safety-critical applications in a dynamic environment. Therefore, in most communication models, both safety and non-safety critical applications operate through the same radio access technology. This is the case of both C-V2X Direct Communication and IEEE 802.11p. However, in an urban environment characterized by high traffic density, the availability of resources can be problematic. In that case, it would be best to propose new communication strategies because different use cases will have different sets of requirements. In this paper, we propose to increase the capacity of C-V2X Direct Communication by introducing WiFi Direct as a second connection alternative. Indeed, several works have shown that WiFi offloading can alleviate the congestion of cellular networks. Thus, an SDN-based P2P Group Formation is proposed by extending OpenFlow to manage the WiFi Direct control plane. This solution also allows establishing multi-hop communication, something that is not possible in the standard version of WiFi Direct. The performance evaluation of the P2P Group Formation procedure is proposed via simulations in an urban environment. The results show that our proposed procedure performs better compared to those proposed in the literature. To demonstrate the implementation feasibility of the proposed solution in real hardware, we also performed prototyping.