The new developments in mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has positioned 5G and beyond in a strong position to answer the market need towards future emerging intelligent transportation systems and smart city applications. The major attractive features of V2X communication is the inherent ability to adapt to any type of network, device, or data, and to ensure robustness, resilience and reliability of the network, which is challenging to realize. In this work, we propose to drive further these features by proposing a novel robust, resilient and reliable architecture for V2X communication based on harnessing MEC and blockchain technology. A three stage computing service is proposed. Firstly, a hierarchcial computing architecture is deployed spanning over the vehicular network that constitutes cloud computing (CC), edge computing (EC), fog computing (FC) nodes. The resources and data bases can migrate from the high capacity cloud services (furthest away from the individual node of the network) to the edge (medium) and low level fog node, according to computing service requirements. Secondly, the resource allocation filters the data according to its significance, and rank the nodes according to their usability, and selects the network technology according to their physical channel characteristics. Thirdly, we propose a blockchain-based transaction service that ensures reliability. We discussed two use cases for experimental analysis, plug-in electric vehicles in smart grid scenarios, and massive IoT data services for autonomous cars. The results show that car connectivity prediction is accurate 98% of the times, where 92% more data blocks are added using micro-blockchain solution compared to the public blockchain, where it is able to reduce the time to sign and compute the proof-of-work (PoW), and deliver a low-overhead Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This approach can be considered a strong candidate architecture for future V2X, and with more general application for everything-to-everything (X2X) communications.

Autonomous driving is delightedly an innovative and revolutionary paradigm for future intelligent transport systems. To be fully functional and efficient, vehicles will use hundreds of sensors and generate terabytes of data that will be used and shared for safety, infotainment and allied services. Communication among vehicles or between vehicle and infrastructure thus requires data rate, latency and reliability far beyond what the legacy dedicated short‐range communication (DSRC) and long‐term evolution‐advanced (LTE‐A) systems can support. In this work, the authors motivate the use of millimetre‐wave (mmWave) massive multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) technology to facilitate gigabits‐per‐second (Gbps) communication for cellular vehicle‐to‐infrastructure scenarios. As a fundamental component, the authors characterise the mmWave massive MIMO vehicular channel using metrics such as path loss, root‐mean‐square delay spread, Rician K ‐factor, cluster and ray distribution, power delay profile, channel rank and condition number as well as data rate. They compare the mmWave performance with the DSRC and LTE‐A capabilities, and offer useful insights on vehicular channels. The results show that mmWave massive MIMO can deliver Gbps data rates for next‐generation vehicular networks.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard has defined the Basic Set of Applications (BSA) which is composed of three main application classes road/traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and other value-added applications. Traffic safety applications strongly rely on the exchange of two types of safety messages that have been standardized by ETSI namely Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs). The ETSI's comprehensive and well documented standards present the structures and implementations guidelines of these safety messages yet there is lack of extensive work on the implementation and validation. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive architecture and implementation that has been developed to validate the potentials of CAM and DENM messaging capabilities. This paper evaluates the performance of CAM and DENM facilities through a custom IEEE 802.11p (ITS-G5) based prototype (IT2S) deployed in a field trial. The tests validates the CAM performance by tracking vehicles and various performance indicators such the packet error rate (PER), Received Signal strength (RSSI), connection distance between the OBUs and RSU, number of messages transmitted, GPS coordinates and successful packets received. Similarly, DENMs are validated by events such as traffic information, hazardous location and accidents. These tests motivate towards the unified solution for the implementation of a complete ITS.

Real-time dependable communication requires deterministic transmission instants and bounded latency for inter-vehicular communication. Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) has serious drawbacks in what concerns to the timeliness of the communications, since it allows collisions to happen in the channel and it may cause unbounded delays before channel access. This paper proposes an enhanced version of the Vehicular Flexible Time-Triggered (V-FTT) protocol, a deterministic MAC protocol for vehicular communications. Proposed enhancements include novel schemes to protect V-FTT compliant nodes from the interference of non-compliant nodes, which can only transmit during specific slots, the Free Period. These mechanisms were implemented and validated in an ITS G5 station, the IT2S platform.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is an emerging paradigm which attracted massive research in the recent past to enhance the level of safety and efficiency of vehicular networks contributing to comfortable and safer roads. ITS applications and services have strict timelines constraints that must be met by the underline communication protocols in order to support deterministic real-time communications. While the existing technologies are evolving and do not support deterministic real-time communications, we used Vehicular Time-Triggered (V-FTT) Protocol which is a deterministic protocol based on IEEE-802.11p/ETSI-ITS-G5. In this paper, we enhanced the reliability of safety messages by exploiting the real time characteristics of V-FTT protocol and the safety zone concept in an infrastructure based vehicular network. The reliable dissemination of safety messages over V-FTT protocol is made possible by the introduction of redundant Road Side Units (RSUs) inside each safety zone. The analytical and prototype based results reveal that vehicles inside the safety zones with higher redundancy have higher packet success rate thus validate our mechanism.