On the Convergence of C-ITS Services in 5G Infrastructures

Amid the era of hyperconnectivity and the widespread adoption of 5G technology, there is a compelling need to integrate different communication ecosystems within cellular networks; this is the case of vehicular communications. This need arises from the high interest on merging both worlds to enrich the Cooperative-Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) paradigm with the novel features brought by 5G networks. This integration, known as Cellular-Vehicular to Everything (C-V2X), is being actively promoted from the academia and the industry, however, there is still a lack of functional architectures addressing such an integration. This paper presents an effective integrated architecture and the technologies to implement it, aiming at supporting heterogeneous vehicular services in 5G systems. The most novel resource orchestration and traffic handling paradigms are leveraged to provide the solution with adequate levels of flexibility and performance, hence coping with the stringent requirements of the vehicular vertical.