Evolutionary V2X Technologies Toward the Internet of Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities

TLDR

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is emerging to meet the demands of intelligent transportation systems and autonomous vehicles, yet its evolution path, challenges, and opportunities remain unclear despite recent progress. This article surveys the historical development and current status of V2X technologies and outlines emerging directions toward IoV. The authors review the early DSRC era, compare cellular V2X with IEEE 802.11 V2X, and highlight key technical challenges and opportunities for big data‑driven and cloud‑based IoV. The survey offers insights and inspiration for academia and industry on evolutionary V2X technologies toward IoV.

Abstract

To enable large-scale and ubiquitous automotive network access, traditional vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies are evolving to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for increasing demands on emerging advanced vehicular applications, such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous vehicles. In recent years, IoV technologies have been developed and achieved significant progress. However, it is still unclear what is the evolution path and what are the challenges and opportunities brought by IoV. For the aforementioned considerations, this article provides a thorough survey on the historical process and status quo of V2X technologies, as well as demonstration of emerging technology developing directions toward IoV. We first review the early stage when the dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) was issued as an important initial beginning and compared the cellular V2X with IEEE 802.11 V2X communications in terms of both the pros and cons. In addition, considering the advent of big data and cloud-edge regime, we highlight the key technical challenges and pinpoint the opportunities toward the big data-driven IoV and cloud-based IoV, respectively. We believe our comprehensive survey on evolutionary V2X technologies toward IoV can provide beneficial insights and inspirations for both academia and the IoV industry.