On the Coexistence of Aperiodic and Periodic Traffic in Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything

Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communications are the key to connected and autonomous driving, and pave the way for future Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). To support non-safety and safety critical applications in the demanding out-of-coverage scenario, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized the distributed C-V2X Mode 4 solution, whose behavior has been thoroughly analyzed for periodic traffic. In the current work, the problem of allocating aperiodic traffic in Mode 4 is tackled, a matter that has not been addressed before and that raises several challenging questions. A solution for serving such traffic type is put forth, and an analytical insight on the attainable performance is offered. Further, it is numerically proved that guaranteeing aperiodic flows good service levels is hard when their packets are not small sized. This holds true even for sophisticated physical layer choices and at relatively modest traffic densities, revealing that novel approaches to radio resource assignment are a necessity in Fifth Generation (5G) vehicular communications.