Overview of LTE Based Cellular V2X Communication

Vehicle-to-Everything Communication (V2X) is a technology that allows a vehicle to communicate with different entities of the traffic system. These entities include other vehicles (V2V), pedestrians (V2P), infrastructure like traffic signals (V2I) and application servers (V2N). V2X applications can transform existing transportation systems into Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) that will provide intelligent services such as autonomous driving, collision warning, traffic regulation and infotainment.

IEEE 802.11p Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) based radio access has laid the foundation for V2X communication. It defines enhancements to IEEE 802.11 to support ITS applications. IEEE 802.11p allows vehicles to communicate their state, such as position and speed, to surrounding entities. However, though IEEE 802.11p gives acceptable performance in sparse networks, its performance deteriorates drastically in dense and high load conditions. In dense networks, the probability of collision of data packets increases significantly thereby reducing throughput and increasing delays.

Cellular V2X is the use of cellular radio access technologies like LTE for V2X. It has been shown that LTE V2X provides better performance in different network conditions and provides better mobility support than IEEE 802.11p. It is also suitable for most of the use cases of V2X. In this study, we have done systematic literature review of LTE and IEEE 802.11p based V2X. We present a technical overview of LTE V2X and describe a few important use cases. We also present a comparison of LTE V2X with IEEE 802.11p and highlight the benefits of using LTE for V2X.