MUCS: A New Multichannel Conflict-Free Link Scheduler for Cellular V2X Systems

V2X, the "Vehicle to Everything" communication, facilitates communication among vehicles and other network entities, which is verified to bring in substantial economic and ecological benefits. In the main mode, LTE V2X relies on a central scheduler. As an important problem from the resource management viewpoint, minimizing the consumed resources in a conflict-free manner is NP-hard. In this paper, a novel point of departure is proposed for this NP-hard problem and a polynomial-time heuristic, MUCS, is introduced that models scheduling as a Vehicle Routing Problem. The existing multichannel methods seem to be incapable of satisfying LTE and 5G V2X communication demands and requirements due to their reliance on inapplicable simplifications. Our technique enables contiguous link scheduling, as opposed to most of the existing multichannel methods, which also remarkably performs better. The proposed heuristic MUCS eliminates the need for such simplifying constraints and can be employed in general V2X network topologies. Due to its scalability and a close-to-optimal resource utilization compared to the existing literature, MUCS is desirable for the cellular V2X, i.e., LTE V2X and the upcoming 5G systems.