Vehicle-Mounted Base Station for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: Opportunities and Challenges

The crown jewel of intelligent transportation is achieving autonomous driving that can ultimately become accident- and congestion-free through CAVs and the associated traffic management systems. Recently, this vision has sparked huge research interest, such as IoV, LTE-V2X, and 5G. However, the huge amount of traffic data generated by CAVs poses challenges for the current networks and even the upcoming 5G communication networks.In this article, we first analyze the communication requirements of CAVs and present the progress of vehicular communication networks, and on that basis propose the novel concept of VMBS and a VMBS-CCNA for CAVs. The VMBS plays multiple roles of a user node and edge computing node for external communication networks, and a base station and information caching node for CAVs, thus achieving the fusion of communication and computing for CAVs. To this end, we present both the VMBS-enabled wireless communication and computing for CAVs, and the VMBS-assisted wireless communication for other wireless devices. Several research challenges and some open research issues are highlighted and discussed. Finally, simulation results reveal that the proposed VMBS-CCNA can bring a significant improvement in terms of throughput, delay, and average number of links.