A Framework for Cell Overload Mitigation in 5G Networks: A V2X Perspective

Vehicular communications are positioned to be one of the most impacted sectors in the next generation of cellular networks, enabling a massive rollout of unseen vehicular use cases. However, the inherent high mobility associated with vehicles can lead to vehicular congestions, where the increase in data traffic introduced by vehicular communications can compromise network resource availability. To prevent such situations different overload mitigation approaches can be applied at both network and application layers. In this article we present a framework for cell overload mitigation in 5G networks (FOM-5G) based on the O-RAN architecture and network exposure API defined in the 5G core. Moreover, FOM-5G leverages the usage of historical information to select across network and application-level responses in each overload situation. We assess FOM-5G using realistic vehicular traces in two different traffic congestion scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of customizing overload mitigation approaches to each scenario.