Vehicular Communications

Dear Colleagues,

Vehicular communications are one of the steering topics of the ICT world. Connected vehicles trigger the focus on new technologies, new applications, and new ways to deal with information and data. Additionally, the business behind moving such data from inside the vehicle to outside the vehicle is acquiring importance every day. Solutions for dealing with connected vehicles must take into account a vast range of aspects, resulting in an innovative and challenging topic.

The technologies proposed in recent years have moved from unlicensed spectra, such as IEEE 802.11p, ad-hoc networking, Bluetooth, etc., to licensed spectra, such as LTE, 5G, and beyond. The former group guarantees an easy way to connect vehicles with each other, with point-to-point direct connections, enabling infrastructure-less data exchange with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.

The latter group, by contrast, relies on long-range technologies and the presence of a working infrastructure to guarantee vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, which ends with the potential of having all the vehicles connected to the Internet. Hybrid solutions might have the potential to guarantee V2V or V2I capabilities, depending on the environment, providing a flexible configuration with respect to the application considered.

Although the time for mass deployment seems near, several issues still remain to be solved, starting with the need for novel applications to boost innovation. What we are missing now is an improvement of throughput and coverage, latency suppression, robust security and positioning, and simulations and models to validate all of these aspects of the global vehicular communication system.

This Special Issue solicits the submission of high-quality and unpublished papers that aim to solve open technical problems and challenges related to vehicular communications. Both theoretical and experimental studies are encouraged, as well as high-quality review and survey papers.

Prof. Carlo Augusto Grazia
Dr. Natale Patriciello
Dr. Martin Klapez
Guest Editors

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