# Analysis of Mobile Edge Computing for Vehicular Networks +
## 1 Introduction  
Advancement in autonomous vehicle technologies has created a demand for higher-bandwidth, improved availability, and ubiquitous networking technologies. The aging capabilities of the dedicated short range communication (DSRC) standard, which were originally defined for vehicular communications, are being phased out in favor of modern and capable technologies. The pursuit of 5G next-generation networking technologies continues to push development of more robust and ubiquitous wireless communications. Bolstered by such advanced technologies, extensive deployment of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), capable of supporting a wide array of applications will soonbe feasible. Traditional VANETs are ad-hoc in nature, meaning vehicles can communicate with one another without the need for any infrastructure. However, it is widely accepted that an effective vehicular network would require some form of static infrastructure such as roadside-units (RSUs), cell towers, or base stations. An infrastructure built on 5G would support such a network architecture since they are expected to operate in a cellular fashion, not unlike current cellular networks. Recently, research has begun to explore the concept of cellular vehicular networks, referred to as cellular-Vehicle to Everything (C-V2X) [1; 2; 3; 4]. In C-V2X, vehicles do not need to communicate directly with one another. Instead data-transfer takes place just as a cellular phone network, where base stations, or cell towers, cover an area and provide service to all the users in the cell. Communication between vehicles is facilitated by the cell tower and the message would pass from the source vehicle to tower and finally to the destination vehicle. In this scheme, vehicles only need to maintain contact with the cell tower, whereas pure vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) would require a vehicle to negotiate communication with many other vehicles within its vicinity. However, this approach would require the use of the already stressed cellular infrastructure or the addition of new cell towers. Substantial progress has been made to an implementation of cellular V2X in the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) variant LTE-V that employs network functions virtualization (NFV). With NFV, the functions of LTE, such as routing, are virtualized and can be run on commoditiy hardware. This removes the vendor-specific hardware requirements of LTE and results in a much more flexible system. The benefits of LTE over the 802.11 p based DSRC standard include much higher capacity and greater communication range. An increased communication range is particularly valuable in vehicular networks, since this would allow any emergency information to be disseminated throughout the network more quickly. In terms of incident reporting, faster information dissemination could provide a safer driving environment. In response to the progress towards 5G, researchers have begun exploring methods to incorporate the technology into the vehicular network domain. One proposed method of leveraging 5G and cellular technologies in vehicular communications is to introduce shared spectrum platform. In [5] the authors present an approach similar to works in which a combination of LTE and DSRC is proposed and seeks to create a shared spectrum combination of DSRC and 5G. While this may be further off than a combination of DSRC and LTE, coexistence of DSRC, cellular, and 5G would allow for a more robust scalable network that leverages both licensed and un-licensed bands. Sharing spectra, such as those defined for cellular and mmWave allows for full utilization of the available spectrum. Not only would this approach achieve a better utilization of the spectrum, it would allow new technologies to be rolled out alongside existing hardware and allow for an incremental transition to 5G. Continuing the pursuit of full spectrum utilization, additional works have explored the use of wavelengths in the free space optical (FSO) portion of the spectrum.