Connected vehicles are expected to be a pillar of a smart society and to revolutionize the way people move. The use of wireless communication technologies integrated on-board (or in the driver’s or passengers’ pocket) is the key to connecting vehicles, infrastructures, and travellers. The widespread use of connected vehicles generates high volumes of transportation-related data, enabling plenty of new applications which, according to Cisco Visual Networking Index, will give a boost to the second fastest growing industry segment (after connected healthcare), with a predicted 37% compound annual growth rate.

Connected vehicles will improve safety, traffic management, urban and suburban mobility and will enhance the development of new services such as accident prevention, Internet access, Internet backbone, ride-sharing, vehicular social networking, environment monitoring, infotainment, usage-based insurance, and preemptive maintenance. This phenomenon is fostering acceleration of standardization efforts to define new architectures and requirements for the various emerging vehicular applications scenarios. In addition to the existing vehicular communication standards, that is, the IEEE WAVE/802.11p in US and the ETSI-ITS G5 in Europe, different working groups within 3GPP are now studying vehicle-to-anything (V2X) as an additional feature for LTE-Advanced, and future 5G studies will take these concepts even further by evaluating how cellular communications, together with emerging access technologies, such as visible light and mm-waves, can play a key role in enhancing the on-board intelligence of future vehicles.

This special issue focuses on connected vehicle-driven applications and aims at covering cutting-edge research advances in topics covering standardization, wireless communication technologies challenges, field trials, and tight interworking between on-board vehicle intelligence and wireless communication standards.

We solicit papers that present original and unpublished work on certain topics.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-roadside (V2R), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and enabling technologies
• Efficient accident information dissemination
• Cooperative/noncooperative vehicle traffic optimization
• Cooperative/noncooperative driving behaviour characterization
• Floating car data collection and analysis
• Decentralized congestion control in vehicular networks
• Adaptive beaconing
• Security and privacy technologies for connected vehicles
• Medium access and routing protocols for vehicular applications
• Integration of TCP/IP protocols in vehicular networks
• Multichannel management for connected vehicles
• Hybrid communications
• Wireless communication standards to leverage the on-board vehicle intelligence
• Vehicular network architectures and management
• Facilities layer mechanisms and architecture
• Software defined networks applied to connected vehicles
• Cloud and Fog based vehicular computing systems
• Connected autonomous vehicles
• Field operational tests and trials