Reliable and efficient autonomous driving: the need for heterogeneous vehicular networks

Autonomous driving technology has been regarded as a promising solution to reduce road accidents and traffic congestion, as well as to optimize the usage of fuel and lane. Reliable and highly efficient vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications are essential for commercial autonomous driving vehicles to be on the road before 2020. The current article first presents the concept of heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNETs) for autonomous driving, in which an improved protocol stack is proposed to satisfy the communication requirements of not only safety but also non-safety services. We then consider and study in detail several typical scenarios for autonomous driving. In order to tackle the potential challenges raised by the autonomous driving vehicles in HetVNETs, new techniques from transmission to networking are proposed as potential solutions.

Introduction

The automotive industry has recently shifted from developing advanced vehicles to safe and comfortable ones, which stimulates the development of new intelligent vehicles with autonomous driving control [1]. The autonomous driving vehicle (ADV) is a multidisciplinary product that can integrate automotive control, information processing, communication capabilities, and so on. Governments and society can substantially benefit from autonomous driving, including prevention of road accidents, reduction of traffic congestion, as well as optimal usage of fuel and lane [2]. In order to realize autonomous driving, vehicles need to be capable of sensing the surrounding environment as well as performing control and path planning without any human intervention [3]. Global auto-makers and information technology companies, such as General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota, and Google, expect to have ADVs on the market in 2020 and 25 percent of the vehicles out on the road to be ADVs by 2035 [4], which coincides with the timetable of fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems.