Vehicular Multi-access Edge Computing with licensed Sub-6 GHz, IEEE 802.11p and mmWave

With the rapid increase of vehicular Internet of things applications, it is urgent to design a mobile edge computing architecture which is possible to distribute and process a large amount of contents with vehicles on the road. From a communication perspective, the current cellular technology faces challenges due to the limited bandwidth in a dense vehicle environment. In this paper, we propose a multi-access edge computing framework and the corresponding communication protocol which integrates licensed Sub-6 GHz band, IEEE 802.11p, and millimeter wave (mmWave) communications for the content distribution and processing in vehicular networks. The proposed protocol uses a cluster-based approach where a fuzzy logic-based algorithm is employed to select efficient gateway nodes which bridge the licensed Sub-6 GHz communication and the mmWave communication in order to maximize the overall network throughput. IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle communication is used to share information among vehicles in order to achieve efficient clustering. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol under various network conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve significant improvements in various scenarios compared to the existing approaches.