Cloud-Enabled Radio Resource Management for Co-Operative Driving Vehicular Networks

Co-operative automated driving (CAD) is a key fifth generation mobile networks (5G) use case having a wide range of rate-reliability-delay requirements on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. One key 5G enabler for the management and optimization of sidelink resources in a multi-operator environment is the virtualization of radio resource management (RRM) at the cloud server. This, however, is challenging due to an increase in control plane delay, signaling overhead and complexity limiting the possibility to exploit the benefits of the virtualization of sidelink RRM. This paper analyzes the problem of cloud-based sidelink resource allocation for multicast group transmissions and describes the multi-objective optimization problem being translated to three tasks: 1) a vehicle cluster formation for ensuring optimal vehicle reachability in the control plane, 2) an inter-cluster resource block pool (RB-pool) allocation and 3) an intra-cluster resource allocation. A graph-based solution framework is proposed aiming at achieving high modularity, low complexity and decoupling of cluster formation and RB-pool assignment from the intra-cluster optimum resource allocation, which may be performed on different time scales at different entities. Simulation results in a realistic vehicular deployment show significant gains in terms of sidelink throughput and delay while maintaining high link quality.