Self-Sustaining Caching Stations: Towards Cost-Effective 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

In this article, we investigate the cost-effective 5G-enabled vehicular networks to support emerging vehicular applications, such as autonomous driving, in-car infotainment and location-based road services. To this end, self-sustaining caching stations (SCSs) are introduced to liberate on-road base stations from the constraints of power lines and wired backhauls. Specifically, the cache-enabled SCSs are powered by renewable energy and connected to core networks through wireless backhauls, which can realize “drop-and-play” deployment, green operation, and low-latency services. With SCSs integrated, a 5Genabled heterogeneous vehicular networking architecture is further proposed, where SCSs are deployed along roadside for traffic offloading while conventional macro base stations (MBSs) provide ubiquitous coverage to vehicles. In addition, a hierarchical network management framework is designed to deal with high dynamics in vehicular traffic and renewable energy, where content caching, energy management and traffic steering are jointly investigated to optimize the service capability of SCSs with balanced power demand and supply in different time scales. Case studies are provided to illustrate SCS deployment and operation designs, and some open research issues are also discussed. Shan Zhang and Xuemin (Sherman) Shen are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 (Email:{s327zhan, sshen}@uwaterloo.ca). Ning Zhang is with the Department of Computing Science, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, 6300 Ocean Dr., Corpus Christi, Texas, USA, 78412 (Email: [email protected]). X. Fang is with the School of Electronics and Information Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China (email: [email protected]). Peng Yang is with the School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China (email: [email protected]). This work is sponsored in part by the Nature Science Foundation of China No. 91638204 and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.