# SURROGATES: Virtual OBUs to Foster 5G Vehicular Services
## 6 Conclusions  
The coming of 5G technologies will imply a revolution in transportation services, with lots of new services in the areas of safety, traffic efficiency, and infotaintment. In fact, new communication capabilities of 5G even offer a competitor of the IEEE 802.11 OCB technology. In this paper, we have exploited the virtualization and edge computing capabilities of 5G and, more concretely, the potential of MEC to virtualize OBU operations.  
The SURROGATES approach bets on a virtual substitute for OBUs to offload processing serves as a communication proxy to report on-board data, and cache information to resolve requests from services. This is accompanied by a whole infrastructure to gather data from vehicles and the management of the virtualized platform to create vOBU instantiations using OSM capabilities. All components of the architecture have been developed using a proper virtualization environment powered by OSM version 4 and OpenStack Pike, and a reference vehicular communication platform has been used to evaluate the proposal.  
A validation has been carried out through the implementation of a monitoring service using Grafana and an Android app, demonstrating the good operation of the proposal. The performance evaluation has been focused on the delay implied by data requests and their losses due to communication problems in the wireless segment. The results reveal a 50% reduction in the overall delay when using the virtual OBU proposal, and the possibility of avoiding the unstable wireless channel thanks to the local data cache maintained by vOBUs. This further improves reliability of vehicular services such as monitoring platforms, which can suffer from connection outages due to mobility or poor coverage.  
Future lines of work include the research on vOBU migration when different virtual domains are traversed and this VNF needs to be maintained near the access network. Moreover, the SURROGATES approach is being ported to the monitoring of light vehicles by using IoT communication technologies and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) messaging. Here, the offloading of computing tasks will be further analyzed, taking into account common data preprocessing and curation to be migrated to vOBU, which will also imply an impact on OBU energy usage. Finally, the registration process will be transparently managed without the limitation of using a name registry for the manager thanks to SDN, which will also be useful for vOBU migration.  
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.S. and A.F.S.; Data Curation, J.S., P.J.F. and J.O.; Funding Acquisition, J.S. and A.F.S.; Investigation, J.S., J.O. and R.S.-I.; Methodology, J.S., P.J.F., J.O., R.S.-I. and A.F.S.; Project Administration, J.S. and A.F.S.; Resources, J.S., P.J.F., J.O. and A.F.S.; Software, P.J.F. and J.O.; Supervision, J.S. and A.F.S.; Validation, P.J.F. and J.O.; Visualization, J.S., P.J.F. and R.S.-I.; Writing--Original Draft, J.S., P.J.F., J.O. and R.S.-I.; Writing--Review and Editing, J.S., P.J.F., J.O., R.S.-I. and A.F.S.  
**Funding:** This research was funded by the European Commission, under the projects 5 GINFIRE (Grant No. 732497) and 5G-MOBIX (Grant No. 825496), by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under the project PERSEIDES (Grant No. TIN2017-68685-R) and the Ramon y Cajal Program (Grant No. RYC-2017-23823), and by the BBVA Foundation, under the 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators.  
**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank 5 GINFIRE partners for their technical support during the execution of experiments.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.