Guest Editorial: Centralized Management of Smart Transportation

Abstract

Cellular networking infrastructure supports various types of services including vehicular networking. This means that employing advanced technologies within sixth generation (6G) communications will enforce more refinements on autonomous vehicles and subsequently on the whole smart transportation sector. Nowadays, vehicles communicate with each other or with the network as individual machines that relate to each other through sharing various data about landscape and platform status. The traffic flow at any street is an interaction of sets of factors, such as street capacities, vehicle trajectories, spatiotemporal congestion, etc. Autonomous vehicles will use sensors and network data in evaluating the safest and fastest route to follow. Similarly, autonomous vehicles will share their platform health indicators to reduce the impact of accidental crashes and support of power dispatching in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networking. However, this type of automation reflects the early phases of network connected vehicles and may not leverage all possible use cases. For example, the emergence of blockchain-based networks will transform vehicular networking with distributed lodger models and dynamic creation of block spots that record all events. This sophisticated trace identification of data initiators and users will provide autonomous vehicles with more accurate and instant changes in street traffic flow. This issue of the Vehicular Networking Series includes four articles, which are briefly summarized here.