A Mobile Edge Computing Approach for Vehicle to Everything Communications

This paper explores the exploitation of Mobile/Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. Certain V2X applications that aim at improving road safety require reliable and low latency message delivery. As the number of connected vehicles increases, these requirements cannot be satisfied by technologies relying on the IEEE 802.11p standard. Therefore, the exploitation of the 4th generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile networks has been considered. However, despite their widespread use, LTE systems are characterized by high end-to-end latency since the messages have to traverse the core network. MEC addresses this problem by offering computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network closer to the end-users. This paper aims at investigating the benefits MEC may offer toward implementing V2X communications. In this framework, simulation scenarios were examined concerning various V2X use cases implemented employing either LTE or MEC. The simulation results indicate a clear superiority of MEC over LTE, especially in the case of delivering critical data.

Exploiting the Cellular Infrastructure for Data Transmission in Smart Metering Systems

To implement the access and backhaul networks for Smart Metering (SM) systems various technologies are combined with the existing communications infrastructure. This paper deals with data transmission in SM systems, focusing on how the existing cellular networks infrastructure is employed to implement SM access communication networks. The analysis aims at analyzing the role of the cellular communications infrastructure taking into account the spatial distribution and installation points of the smart meters, the urban and topological characteristics of the SM deployment areas and the common practice so far followed by the utilities. It is demonstrated that cellular communications, either exclusively or combined with power line communications, enable immediate and scalable deployment of SM access communication networks at low installation cost, thus constituting the basic option for the implementation of smart metering.

QUIC vs TCP: A Performance Evaluation over LTE with NS-3

In the vast majority of mobile applications, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is still leveraged at the transport layer of the Internet’s protocol stack. But, in many cases, the performance of TCP over mobile networks has been proven sub-optimal in practice, thus causing substantial bottlenecks. Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a new protocol, currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that aims at solving some of the inherent problems of TCP. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of QUIC and compare the performance of QUIC and TCP in wireless networks. To compare QUIC with TCP under various transmission scenarios over LTE networks, the ns-3 network simulator has been employed. The simulations performed showed that 1) under good or average transmission conditions, QUIC is characterized by a better steady state throughput at the same time achieving quite lower file download times;and 2) under poor transmission conditions, the two protocols exhibit a similar performance.