Recent advances in vehicular communications and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) intend to trim down the fuel expenditure by avoiding congested traffic, enhancement of traffic safety, and initiating new application, that is, mobile infotainment. Commonly, we have three types of vehicle communication models, that is, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-roadside (V2Rs) communications. Due to the rapid growth in this field, many research constraints need to be addressed, for example, reliability and latency, appropriate scalable design of MAC and routing protocols, performance and adaptability to the changes in environment (node density and oscillation in network topology), and evaluation and validation of vehicular communication protocols under the umbrella of coherent assumptions using simulation methodologies. This special issue aims to emphasize the latest achievements to identify the robust and efficient data forwarding techniques in vehicular communications and networks that are identical. Also, we will expect papers for exploring new networking paradigms in vehicular networks such as network virtualization, big data, and Internet of Things.

The possible papers are likely to exploit connectionism and emergence of networking systems in various problem-solving methods in the vehicular networks. It may also outline essential challenges, proof of the concept studies with a direct and simulated comparison to technical solutions, and mathematical models of communication principles in the same domain.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Intravehicle communication (vehicle-to-pedestrians, vehicle-to-portable, vehicle-to-sign, etc.)
• Network and system architecture for data forwarding in vehicular networks
• MAC protocols and channel management
• Vehicular Networks Virtualization
• Physical layer and routing protocols
• Delay tolerant vehicular networks
• Real-time optimization system, modeling, and theory
• Internet-of-vehicles and smart sensors (infrastructure and vehicle based)
• Mobility management (traffic models)
• Information and content centric networking in ITS