Improving Freeway Network Mobility: A Comparative Study of Vehicle Cloudification and VANET Architectures

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are a traditional approach to providing minimal reliance on existing infrastructure, though they can experience high communication overhead and network disruptions. Vehicular micro clouds (VMCs) provide a promising solution to overcome the challenges of VANET by reducing communication latency through collaborative data allocation and data offloading. This paper offers a comparative performance analysis of VANET communications versus stationary and dynamic VMCs. Specifically, it studies incident management through speed and lane-changing advisories and freeway platooning. To further enhance the analysis, the performance of both communication architectures is evaluated using DSRC communication protocols versus cellular technologies (C-V2X, 4G LTE, and 5G NR). The system-level features, such as driving safety and vehicular mobility are measured to evaluate the efficacy of the communication systems under free-flow and incident-induced traffic conditions. The stationary cloud's latency and packet loss ratio are found to be 6.2 and 4.8 higher than those of the dynamic clouds, respectively. In addition, the stationary and dynamic cloud systems show advantages in reducing travel time delay, even at high penetration rates of the connected vehicles. The results suggest a shift towards more reliance on connected vehicular clouds to minimise the risks of message interference and system overload, whilst fostering intelligent freeway traffic management systems.