Internet of Autonomous Vehicles: Architecture, Features, and Socio-Technological Challenges

Mobility is the backbone of urban life and a vital economic factor in the development of the world. Rapid urbanization and the growth of mega-cities are bringing dramatic changes in the capabilities of vehicles. Innovative solutions like autonomy, electrification, and connectivity are on the horizon. How, then, we can provide ubiquitous connectivity to legacy and autonomous vehicles? This article seeks to answer this question by combining recent leaps of innovation in network virtualization with remarkable feats of wireless communications. To do so, this article proposes a novel paradigm called the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IoAV). We begin painting the picture of IoAV by discussing the salient features and applications of IoAV, followed by a detailed discussion on the key enabling technologies. Next, we describe the proposed layered architecture of IoAV and uncover some critical functions of each layer. This is followed by the performance evaluation of IoAV, which shows significant advantages of the proposed architecture in terms of transmission time and energy consumption. Finally, to best capture the benefits of IoAV, we enumerate some social and technological challenges, and explain how some unresolved issues can disrupt the widespread use of autonomous vehicles in the future.