Towards 6G vehicular networks: Vision, technologies, and open challenges

Abstract

As an essential method to meet the communication requirements of intelligent transportation and automated driving, vehicular networks facilitate intelligent interaction and cooperation among vehicles and pedestrians, vehicles, infrastructures, and cloud platforms. Enabled by 4G and 5G communications, cellular vehicle to everything (C-V2X)-based vehicular networks have been widely applied in safety and efficiency improvement scenarios of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, the development of autonomous driving and ITS technologies requires the support of lower latency and more reliable communications to realize advanced driving applications such as platooning and sensor-sharing, which raises higher requirements for the performance of vehicular networks. Towards 2030 and beyond, 6G communications will construct intelligent connections for everything and provide the ultimate performance, thus 6G-enabled vehicular networks have been widely researched. This paper surveys and categorizes a comprehensive array of existing studies on the intersection of 6G and vehicular networks. Drawing insights from these studies, we delineate the evolutionary trajectory of 6G and vehicular networks, outlining a visionary perspective on their forthcoming development. Furthermore, we summarize and analyze the existing studies from the perspective of enabling technologies such as communication, intelligence, and security. Finally, by analyzing the characteristics of the existing works, we provide the future challenges and potential research directions for 6G vehicular networks.