Towards a 5G Vehicular Architecture

In the coming years, the vehicular networks should be integrated in a global 5G network. Indeed, the 5G system aims to respond to a wide range of services including Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and, therefore, vehicular communications. However, the current Cooperative-Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) architecture does not meet the key design recommendations of the 5G architecture design. Thus, this integration is not possible yet. Indeed, five different improvements should be considered to make it possible: network intelligence and automation, edge data processing and interoperability, network control, environment virtualization and finally security and privacy. Different papers have already proposed architectures enabling some of these improvements through the integration of different technologies in the C-ITS architecture. To highlight their strengths and their limits, these states-of-the-art solutions are compared. None of them propose a solution meeting the five identified improvements. That is why this paper presents a new architecture taking all these improvements into account. In particular, to complete the existing work, automation, security, privacy and trust are considered. To do so, a knowledge plane enhancing the functioning of the whole architecture is designed. Moreover, a security and privacy plane, strengthening trust in the vehicular environment thanks to Blockchain, is proposed. The role of the different components of this four-plane architecture is also described. Finally, some of the main challenges of the deployment of the proposed architecture are discussed.