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.