Enhanced Driving with 5G: A New Approach for Alleviating Traffic Congestion

Traffic congestion and jams cause delays, which can be critical in public safety use cases where lives are at stake. Vehicle to Everything (V2X), by enabling vehicles to communicate with each others and with roadside infrastructure, provides revolutionary applications such as grouping the vehicles into platoons, autonomous driving, and traffic flow management. While these applications help to leverage road capacity, thus to improve traffic efficiency and safety, they require an ultra-reliable low latency communications and high data traffic. 5G enabling technologies such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) help to meet these requirements. Our contribution is twofold: First, we introduce a novel approach, exploiting the aforementioned technologies, to alleviate traffic congestion and jams. Second, we demonstrate our approach and its utility through a realistic emergency use case.