Benchmarking 4G and 5G-Based Cellular-V2X for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication and Urban Scenarios in Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication is expected to bring tremendous benefits in terms of increased road safety, improved traffic efficiency and decreased environmental impact. In 2017, The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released 3GPP Release 14, which introduced Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything communication (C-V2X), bringing Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication capabilities to cellular networks, hence creating an alternative to Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) technology. Since then, every new 3GPP Release including Release 15, a first full set of 5G standards, offered V2X capabilities. In this paper, we present a complex simulation study, which benchmarks the performance of LTE-based and 5G-based C-V2X technologies deployed for V2I communication in an urban setting. The study compares LTE and 5G deployed both in the Device-to-Device in mode 3 and in infrastructural mode. Target performance indicators used for comparison are average end-to-end (E2E) latency and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR). The performance of those technologies is studied under varying communication conditions realized by a variation of vehicle traffic intensity, communication perimeter and message generation frequency. Furthermore, the effects of infrastructure deployment density on the performance of selected C-V2X communication technologies are explored by comparing the performance of the investigated technologies for three infrastructure density scenarios, i.e., involving two, four and eight base stations (BSs). The performance results are put into a context of the connectivity requirements of the most popular V2I communication services. The results indicate that both C-V2X technologies can support all the considered V2I services without any limitations in terms of the communication perimeter, traffic intensity and message generation frequency. When it comes to the infrastructure density deployment, the results show that increasing the density of the infrastructure deployment from two BSs to four BSs offers a remarkable performance improvement for all the considered V2I services as well as investigated technologies and their modes. Further infrastructure density increase (from four BSs to eight BSs) does not yield any practical benefits in the investigated urban scenario.