The 5G ecosystem is comprised of the cellular 5G System, as well as a managed and orchestrated infrastructure providing virtualized network and service functions. The automotive industry with its stringent requirements for connected vehicles is a promising and yet challenging consumer of such 5G ecosystem. Deployment of service instances at distributed cloud resources of cellular network infrastructure edges enables localized low-latency access to these services from moving vehicles but comes along with challenges, such as the need for fast reconfiguration of the distributed deployment according to mobility pattern and associated service and resource demand. In this paper, we investigate a solution for the collaborative orchestration of services for Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) within such 5G ecosystem. A key objective is the service continuity for a highly dynamic automotive scenario, achieved by the associated management and orchestration of these services in distributed edge clouds. The proposed solution leverages a multi-tier orchestration system as well as localized management and protocol operations for collaborative edge resources. By means of both analytical and experimental evaluations, the paper draws conclusions on the gain in accelerating orchestration decisions and enforcements, while balancing associated protocol and computational load over the highly distributed and multi-layered orchestration system.

Centralized services with Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication can be leveraged to provide precise and up-to-date maneuver recommendations to autonomous vehicles, enabling higher levels of automation. As centralized services have a complete view of the situation on the road, they can be exploited to enable L4 automation & beyond, as opposed to having each node manage an automated maneuver in a distributed way. It is thus pivotal to develop and deploy efficient real-time services, at the edge of the network, to enable low-latency maneuver management services. This paper presents an innovative open-source, 5G & Multi-Access Edge Computing enabled service, called Server Local Dynamic Map (S-LDM), aimed at collecting information about vehicles, based on standard-compliant messages, to create a map of the road, which can then be efficiently shared with other services managing L4 automation. We validated our service on both simulation and pilot trial on a production 5G network involving three main European Mobile Network Operators and real vehicles from Stellantis.

5G has opened up possibilities of introducing new use cases and business models that could not be perceived before. In the context of public safety, 5G offers immense opportunities towards enhancing mission success and situation awareness during emergency management. This paper introduces Back-Situation Awareness (BSA) application enabling early warning/notification to vehicles of an approaching emergency vehicle indicating its presence and the time it will arrive. Such an application is expected to give drivers enough time to create a safety corridor for the emergency vehicle to pass through safely and unhindered. We provide details on the system and application design of the BSA application leveraging Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) systems that complement the 5G mobile communication system. An evaluation of the application is provided by using data measurements and indicating the accuracy of the computation and notification of the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) based on the ETSI C-ITS protocol messages.