Hybrid 5G-VANET Architecture for High-Mobility Environments: Design, Simulation, and Performance Evaluation under Dynamic Traffic Conditions

• Rizky Pratama

  Universitas Negeri Semarang, Department of Computer Science and Electronics, Jalan Sekaran Raya, Gunungpati, Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia

  Author

• Andika Saputra

  Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Department of Informatics Engineering, Jalan Lingkar Selatan, Tamantirto, Bantul, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

  Author

• Fajar Wirawan

  Universitas Mulawarman, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Jalan Kuaro, Samarinda Ulu, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

  Author

• Ariful Islam

  Dhaka, Bangladesh

  Author

Vehicular networking has evolved from isolated roadside deployments to dense, heterogeneous ecosystems in which vehicles, road infrastructure, and cloud services interact at millisecond timescales. Recent cellular advancements have expanded the design space for cooperative perception, collision avoidance, and low-latency content distribution, but persistent challenges remain in high-mobility corridors and urban canyons where topology reshapes within fractions of a second and bursty traffic surges occur unpredictably. This paper presents a hybrid 5G-VANET architecture that fuses sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave cellular links with IEEE 802.11p/OCB-style sidelinks and multi-access edge computing, emphasizing controllable handover dynamics, cross-layer scheduling, and measurement-driven adaptation under dynamic traffic conditions. The architecture integrates local vehicular broadcast for neighborhood awareness with centralized coordination at near-edge controllers that track short-term link states, queue dynamics, and vehicle trajectories to guide resource allocation and route selection. We develop a modeling framework that establishes a unified view of radio, network, and transport layers, enabling scalable decision policies that explicitly trade delay against reliability while remaining feasible under realistic road geometries, shadowing, and variable penetration rates. The evaluation combines analytic bounds with packet-level simulation across multilane highways and signalized grids, capturing handover latency, throughput fairness, and reliability across nonstationary regimes. Results indicate consistent gains in median delay and tail reliability across heterogeneous load profiles while maintaining stability when traffic demand spikes exceed average by up to 300\%. The findings suggest practical design levers for operators and automotive platforms seeking predictable quality under high mobility without relying exclusively on either centralized or purely ad hoc control.

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