rapid advances in sensing, communication, networking, and computing technologies have triggered emerging concepts, such as the connected and autonomous vehicles (cav). in the paradigm of cav, vehicles in the future can efficiently monitor their internal health conditions through plenty of onboard units to enhance transportation safety. in addition, the vehicles will become more intelligent and capable of fully autonomous driving to improve the user experience dramatically. moreover, they can form distributed mobile networks for information exchange among vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v), vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i), and vehicle-to-human (v2h), in which traffic efficiency will be increased significantly toward innovative and sustainable transportation. however, realizing such a blueprint is not trivial because several challenges are facing at current. among them, efficient network connectivity and network-level autonomy are two fundamental issues.
from the perspective of efficient network connectivity, frequent topology changes due to high mobility in vehicular networks often cause communication failure. moreover, the diversity of wireless communication techniques has already been widely applied, and therefore it is needed to connect these heterogeneous vehicles with different types of onboard units. lastly, vehicular networks are mission-critical that require high reliability, and low delay for both simple information and multimedia streaming (e.g., image, voice, and video) transmission, especially in harsh wireless interference, and complex geographical environments.
on the other hand, network-level autonomous vehicles must enhance the intelligence of each vehicle and the cooperation and interaction between vehicles, humans, and even the elements in cav. all objects are expected to be “active” and intelligent to fill these gaps.
emerging technologies developed in recent years provide potential opportunities to address the above challenges. therefore, the special issue aims to publish original research and state-of-the-art articles that explore emerging information and communications technologies for connected and autonomous vehicles. the topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
manuscript submission deadline: 15 january 2023
initial decision notification: 15 march 2023
revised manuscript due: 15 april 2023
final decision: 30 april 2023
final manuscript due: 10 may 2023
publication date: july/august 2023