IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: High Mobility 5G LTE-V: Challenges and Solutions

The Internet of Vehicles, previously referred to as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), will be a collection of mobile ad hoc networks for vehicular communications to improve driving safety and traffic efficiency. Major categories include vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Collectively these (and future categories) can be termed V2X communications. These two categories entail a variety of communication channels, network topologies, vehicle densities and communication scenarios, and in response to this, IEEE has released the IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 1609 protocols for VANETs. With the global commercial application of Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communication systems, LTE based vehicular (LTE-V) networks have been shown to offer advantages in V2I communications, coverage, high mobility and complicated communication scenarios. Therefore, in the 5th generation’s (5G) mobile communication networks, the 3GPP is discussing V2V communications as a device-to-device (D2D) communication application. As is well known, in high mobility scenarios, the wireless channel is rapidly time- varying, Doppler shifts and spreads can be much larger than in cellular, network topology can change quickly, and switching among base stations and vehicles is more frequent. All this presents formidable challenges to realizing reliable communications with low latency in 5G LTE-V systems.