Fog-Enabled Scalable C-V2X Architecture for Distributed 5G and Beyond Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, as fostered by fifth generation (5G) applications, demands a highly available network infrastructure. In particular, the Internet of Vehicles use cases, as a subset of the overall IoT environment, require a combination of high availability and low latency in big volume support. This can be enabled by a network function virtualization architecture that is able to provide resources wherever and whenever needed, from the core to the edge up to the end user proximity, in accordance with the fog computing paradigm. In this article, we propose a fog-enabled cellular vehicle-to-everything architecture that provides resources at the core, the edge and the vehicle layers. The proposed architecture enables the connection of virtual machines, containers and unikernels that form an application-as-a-service function chain that can be deployed across the three layers. Furthermore, we provide lifecycle management mechanisms that can efficiently manage and orchestrate the underlying physical resources by leveraging live migration and scaling functionalities. Additionally, we design and implement a 5G platform to evaluate the basic functionalities of our proposed mechanisms in real-life scenarios. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme maximizes the accepted requests, without violating the applications' service level agreement.Grant numbers : SPOT5G - Single Point of attachment communications heterogeneous mobile data networks ( TEC2017-87456-P) and MonB5G - Distributed management of Network Slices in beyond 5G (code: 871780) projects.© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works