A Tutorial on the LTE-V2X Direct Communication

The concept of direct communications between vehicles and to/from vehicles and roadside infrastructure (vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure – V2X) has been around for more than 20 years. With the specification of direct communication in the 3GPP, a new V2X technology has emerged with the global telecommunications specification efforts. This technology, formally known as PC5 Sidelink, but commonly called LTE-V2X (or sometimes C-V2X) is initially based on Release 14 of 3GPP, enabling those long-envisioned use cases to be delivered with a different, mainstreamed radio access technology. This paper summarizes how LTE-V2X works, describes the standard activities in different layers of LTE-V2X protocol stack for US deployment, and showcases the performance of LTE-V2X in variety of real-world driving scenarios.