Wireless Toward the Era of Intelligent Vehicles

The current age is witnessing speedy revolution of vehicles from the hundred-year old moving metal box on four wheels into a new species with dazzling intelligence. To enable such intelligence, the nervous system heavily hinges upon the connectivity among vehicles as well as between vehicles and the transportation infrastructure. With such intelligence, humans would be relieved from the driving duties and naturally convert the vehicle into moving offices or entertainment rooms, thus imposing unprecedented burden to the connectivity to the world beyond the vehicle. Due to the mobile nature of vehicles, wireless naturally becomes the rescue. However, though wireless has been, to some extent, deployed on vehicles for more than half a century, the current wireless-vehicle interactions are, to the best, a mere combination, in which the wireless systems are designed accounting for the mobile environment, but do not have much to do with the vehicle core functions. In this paper, we will discuss the challenges, progresses and perspectives of the present-to-the-near-future vehicular wireless channels, wireless-vehicle combination, as well as the more demanding wireless-vehicle integration.