V2X Meets NOMA: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Benefited from the widely deployed infrastructure, the LTE network has recently been considered as a promising candidate to support the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. However, with a massive number of devices accessing the V2X network in the future, the conventional OFDM-based LTE network faces the congestion issues due to its low efficiency of orthogonal access, resulting in significant access delay and posing a great challenge especially to safety-critical applications. The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique has been well recognized as an effective solution for the future 5G cellular networks to provide broadband communications and massive connectivity. In this article, we investigate the applicability of NOMA in supporting cellular V2X services to achieve low latency and high reliability. Starting with a basic V2X unicast system, a novel NOMA-based scheme is proposed to tackle the technical hurdles in designing high spectral efficient scheduling and resource allocation schemes in the ultra dense topology. We then extend it to a more general V2X broadcasting system. Other NOMA-based extended V2X applications and some open issues are also discussed.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Vehicular Networks: Taming the Age of Information Tail

While the notion of age of information (AoI) has recently emerged as an important concept for analyzing ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), the majority of the existing works have focused on the average AoI measure. However, an average AoI based design falls short in properly characterizing the performance of URLLC systems as it cannot account for extreme events that occur with very low probabilities. In contrast, in this paper, the main objective is to go beyond the traditional notion of average AoI by characterizing and optimizing a URLLC system while capturing the AoI tail distribution. In particular, the problem of vehicles' power minimization while ensuring stringent latency and reliability constraints in terms of probabilistic AoI is studied. To this end, a novel and efficient mapping between both AoI and queue length distributions is proposed. Subsequently, extreme value theory (EVT) and Lyapunov optimization techniques are adopted to formulate and solve the problem. Simulation results shows a nearly two-fold improvement in terms of shortening the tail of the AoI distribution compared to a baseline whose design is based on the maximum queue length among vehicles, when the number of vehicular user equipment (VUE) pairs is 80. The results also show that this performance gain increases significantly as the number of VUE pairs increases.Comment: Accepted in IEEE GLOBECOM 2018 with 7 pages, 6 figure

A Two-Stage Allocation Scheme for Delay-Sensitive Services in Dense Vehicular Networks

Driven by the rapid development of wireless communication system, more and more vehicular services can be efficiently supported via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. In order to allocate radio resource with the reasonable implementation complexity in dense urban intersection, a two-stage allocation algorithm is proposed in this paper, whose main objective is to minimize delay and ensure reliability. In particular, as for the first stage, the allocation policy is based on traffic density information (TDI), which is different from utilizing channel state information (CSI) and queue state information (QSI) in the second stage. Moreover, in order to reflect the influence of TDI on delay, a macroscopic vehicular mobility model is employed in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can acquire an asymptotically optimal performance with the acceptable complexity

Performance Analysis of Unsupervised LTE Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication

Cellular network technology based device-to-device communication attracts increasing attention for use cases such as the control of autonomous vehicles on the ground and in the air. LTE provides device-to-device communication options, however, the configuration options are manifold (leading to 150+ possible combinations) and therefore the ideal combination of parameters is hard to find. Depending on the use case, either throughput, reliability or latency constraints may be the primary concern of the service provider. In this work we analyze the impact of different configuration settings of unsupervised LTE device-to-device (sidelink) communication on the system performance. Using a simulative approach we vary the length of the PSCCH period and the number of PSCCH subframes and determine the impact of different combinations of those parameters on the resulting latency, reliability and the interarrival times of the received packets. Furthermore we examine the system limitations by a scalability analysis. In this context, we propose a modified HARQ process to mitigate scalability constraints. Our results show that the proposed reduced HARQ retransmission probability can increase the system performance regarding latency and interarrival times as well as the packet transmission reliability for higher channel utilization