Towards Smarter Vehicular Communications: Leveraging Open RAN for Enhanced Vehicle-to-Vehicle Resources Management

The advancement of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technology promises to revolutionize transportation systems, but robust and effective communication among CAVs is needed to ensure safety and efficiency. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, particularly vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, offers direct vehicular data exchange without burdening network infrastructure. However, the dynamic nature of vehicular scenarios and the strict application requirements pose critical challenges in the radio resource allocation domain. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Open RAN (O-RAN)-based solution, leveraging O-RAN’s flexibility and programmability. The proposed solution employs standardized interfaces to collect and analyze traffic data, enabling centralized cross-base station resource allocation. Implemented as an O-RAN xApp, the solution demonstrates superior performance in large-scale vehicular simulations compared to existing radio allocation schemes, showcasing effectiveness in managing diverse traffic profiles and minimizing allocation collisions with negligible overhead. Evaluation against Mode 2 demonstrates the solution’s efficacy with respect to the standard. Overall, the study highlights for the first time O-RAN’s potential in managing radio resources for V2V communication.