Enhancing Vehicle Orientation in Toll Stations Using vMEC and Hybrid Vehicular Communications

Toll management systems have a vital role in facilitating smooth and effective traffic flow at toll stations. To this end, numerous use cases have been explored to guide and detect vehicles at toll stations. This paper presents the results of a study conducted on a testbed as part of the European project InDiD. By utilizing more robust technologies, our work aims to enhance a specific use case explored within this project. Leveraging the resources of the APRR (Autoroute Paris-Rhin-Rhône enhanced) Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS) testbed, we did two experiments to assess the use of two technologies in improving vehicles orientation while approaching a toll station. The first one featured an upgraded vehicular communication network, incorporating both ITS-G5 and LTE-UU to improve the reliability of the vehicular communications. The subsequent one integrated computational power directly onto the vehicle (vMEC) to compare it with the use of an edge computing resource. The results show an improvement in reliability, a coverage extension, and a favorable latency tradeoff when using the vMEC. Additionally, we closely monitored the downlink resource consumption while employing hybrid communication.