Enhancing Vehicular Communication Using 5G-Enabled Smart Collaborative Networking

5G is increasingly becoming a prominent technology promoting the development of mobile networks. Meanwhile, the ever increasing demands for vehicular networks are driven by a variety of vehicular services and application scenarios. Therefore, a new architectural design, which can harness the benefits of 5G for vehicular networks, can take a solid step toward increasing bandwidth and improving reliability for vehicular communications. In this article, we focus on the innovations of a novel and practical 5G-enabled smart collaborative vehicular network (SCVN) architecture, based on our long-term research and practice in this field. SCVN not only considers the various technical features of a 5G network, but also includes different mobile scenarios of vehicular networks. We have performed extensive experiments in various scenarios, including high-density vehicles moving at low or high speed across dense cells, to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. The real-world experimental results demonstrate that SCVN achieves better performance in throughput, reliability, and handover latency compared to its counterparts.