A Reference Framework for Social-enhanced Vehicle-to-Everything Communications in 5G Scenarios

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications are widely recognized as a key technology enabler of in- creased road safety, improved traffic efficiency, and more comfortable traveling experience. Notably, ve- hicles on the road may share common interests and some mobility patterns determined by the road topology and the human habits and they can cooperate by exchanging valuable information. These so- cial aspects of vehicular mobility can be exploited in many ways, for entertainment, public utility and emergency purposes. In this paper we speculate on how the social dimension can be leveraged in future fifth generation (5G) V2X systems. Specifically, we propose a novel social-enhanced 5G-V2X framework which leverages mobile edge computing (MEC) and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies with the aim to ex- ploit social relationships between V2X entities and facilitate data delivery in this context. Early results are provided to showcase the viability of the proposal in a representative scenario, i.e., safety alert dissemi- nation, and demonstrate its benefits compared to a legacy cellular-aided data dissemination approach.