Dear Colleagues,

Recent developments in software, hardware, and communication technologies have opened the way towards connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as a means to improve road safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment services. The potential of future CAVs can be fully unleashed through wireless communications with roadside units, vehicles, pedestrians, and, in principle, any other object/person that may interact with the vehicles. This concept, which is generally referred to as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, makes it possible to collect and share signals and information from a variety of sensors, both in the vehicles and in the surrounding environments, paving the way to the creation of new services. These include the generation and maintenance of high-resolution road maps, cloud-assisted intelligent and cooperative driving, and lightless intersection crossing, as well as new social services, distributed gaming, intelligent and green vehicle sharing, and so on. To this end, future vehicles will need to disseminate the acquisitions from their on-board sophisticated sensors, such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), cameras, radars, etc., whose latency, throughput, and reliability requirements may saturate the capacity of current communication technologies.

On one hand, exploiting new frequency bands, like the lower part of the millimeter-wave spectrum, attracts attention because these bands can theoretically enable connections with data rates on the order of multi-gigabits-per-second. At the same time, it is important to design techniques that select the information to be distributed over bandwidth-constrained communication channels, especially in dense urban environments with a large number of vehicles, based on the value of such information for the target service(s). However, defining and evaluating the value of information is an open challenge.

This Special Issue encourages authors from academia and industry to submit new research results about technological and communication innovations for autonomous vehicles. We look forward to submissions that characterize the information flow generated by different types of sensors in a V2X scenario and the requirements of innovative services, and that study how to optimize data dissemination based on the value that such information has for the target services, while avoiding network congestion. This Special Issue is also open to contributions that propose and validate the use of new technological solutions for V2X communications in view of the strict requirements of future V2X services.

The Special Issue topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Wireless communication technologies for autonomous vehicles;
• Millimeter-wave V2X communications;
• Data-driven techniques in vehicular communication systems;
• Efficient data dissemination in vehicular communication systems;
• Challenges of sensors’ data dissemination in a commercial vehicular system;
• New sensor technologies for V2X services;
• Algorithms for sensor-based object detection and/or tracking in vehicular scenarios;
• Algorithms for sensor-based data compression in vehicular networks;
• On-board vs. edge-assisted sensor processing in vehicular networks;
• 5G/B5G-based sensing solutions for autonomous cars;
• Enhanced context-awareness and environmental mapping algorithms based on V2X;
• Interference and mobility management for wireless autonomous vehicles.

Prof. Dr. Andrea Zanella
Dr. Marco Giordani
Guest Editors

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