3GPP SEAL as an Edge Application: The Ultimate Enabler of Flexible and Universal Communication between Vulnerable Road Users and Autonomous Vehicles

Enhancing communication between Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and Unmanned Automated Vehicles (UAVs) has significant potential to improve road safety. The need for this communication is due to the fact that VRUs will no longer be able to establish physical eye contact with UAVs, given the absence of a human driver behind the steering wheel. However, a challenge in the state-of-the-art technologies for Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Mobility (CCAM), i.e. ITS-G5 (IEEE 802.11p) and Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X), is the lack of a unified communication stack that connects all types of users. This is because the current generation of CCAM communication technologies requires dedicated hardware devices that cannot be easily installed on devices carried by VRUs (such as phones or wearables). This paper aims to address this challenge by providing a real-life, sophisticated solution that offers the CCAM communication stack as a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) in the 5G and Beyond ecosystem. Integration is achieved by relying on the Service Enabler Architecture Layer (SEAL) principles standardised by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). These architectural principles are embedded in the design of Network-Aware Edge Applications (EdgeApps), which are the building blocks of vertical services in 5G and Beyond. This way, any device or user with the capability to connect to 5G will also be able to retrieve important CCAM services from the network by using EdgeApps. In addition, no dedicated CCAM hardware is needed. Furthermore, this paper provides key lessons learned from the challenges encountered in connecting VRUs and UAVs by integrating CCAM into the 5G and Beyond ecosystem. Moreover, we have conducted real-life experiments to evaluate the system-level latency characteristics of the proposed solution and compared them with those of ITS-G5 and C-V2X.