Special Issue of Ad Hoc Networks on Recent Advances in Vehicular Communications and Networking

Vehicular communication for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) plays an increasingly important role in people's lives since it provides safety as well as comfort for passengers and enables more efficient travel by providing timely information to operators of vehicles and concerned authorities. As a result, there will be a strong demand for wireless communications and networking to provide information as well as onboard entertainment services to passengers and driver. Vehicular communication is expected to implement a variety of wired and wireless technologies for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) communications. In Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) for V2V systems, communication may experience serious deterioration due to the lack of accurate channel state information and advanced radio-resource-allocation schemes to assign wireless resources to high-speed vehicles. Moreover, communication among high-speed vehicles through cellular communication networks causes frequent handovers and drop-offs resulting in degradation in overall system performance. This motivates researchers to design innovative resource allocation techniques and robust, as well as, fast handover schemes for dynamically changing topologies of VANETs. In VANETs for V2V communications, trust, security, privacy, and reliable routing are major concerns since the network topology changes constantly. Furthermore, physical layer design issues for wireless communications in high-speed mobile environments are also of vital importance to realize its full potential for ITS. All in all, vehicular communications with dynamically changing topologies is a demanding research topic. The goal of this issue is to bring together the state of the art research contributions that focus on vehicular communications and networking.