5G Heterogeneous Networks for Connected Vehicles

This dissertation establishes a novel multi-layer framework for cooperative connected vehicles. The content of this work is motivated by two main objectives. The first is to design a multi-layer framework supporting the vehicular communication requirements for safety-related applications, namely, high reliability and ultra-low latency. The second is to provide a cooperative communication scheme optimizing the road traffic flow and increasing the safety of the vehicles.

The cooperative scheme for connected vehicles includes the formation and management of platoons upon their creation. It is proved that under certain communication constraints the platoon is stable in addition to being the optimal formation in terms of safety and traffic efficiency. In order to motivate the creation of platoons, a game-theoretical framework is designed which provides a better performance in terms of time to destination, when compared with previous works found in the literature. The core of our cooperative scheme is based on a repulsion/attraction approach, where a penalty is given whenever a user behaves selfishly.