Analysis of Heterogeneous Wireless Vehicular Communication During Handover Process.

5G mobile communications have received enormous attention from the communication community, in particular for applications requiring low latency, as in Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications in Intelligent Transport systems (ITS). 5G has already been studied through simulations and pilot use-cases in vehicular adhoc networks (VANETs) scenarios. Currently, the other prominent wireless technology is ITS-G5, a networking technology standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for vehicular communications. By integrating the ITS-G5 and 4G/5G networks, the advantages of both systems can be readily exploited by the V2I, V2V and V2X systems. In this article, we have investigated low-latency vehicular communications considering the combined operation of ITS-G5 and 5G networks. We specifically analyze the seamless handover process between ITS-G5 and 5G Test Network (5GTN) by conducting field measurements at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) test track in Northern Finland. We analyze the latency and packet drop during the seamless hand-off between the two wireless technologies. This article also discusses an advanced road weather services architecture that assures stable communication links for heterogeneous networking technologies. Results show that the heterogeneous network considerably improves the load balancing and communication link availability between VANETs and infrastructure.