Next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are envisioned to greatly improve the transportation safety and efficiency by incorporating wireless communication and informatics technologies in the transportation system. As the cornerstone for ITS, vehicular communication networks enable vehicles to exchange information with other vehicles and the external environments and play a significant role in supporting a variety of services such as road safety, traffic management, and infotainment.

Vehicular communication networks face many technical challenges such as network scalability, highly dynamic topology, vulnerable wireless links, energy consumption of roadside units, poor network coverage, and bursty traffic. Features including cost-effectiveness, sustainability, interoperation, agility, and flexibility are highly expected, to efficiently support heterogeneous services. Emerging technologies that can improve vehicular communication networks in those aspects include software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), 5G, drone-assisted communications, fog computing, energy harvesting, mobile edge caching, and big data.

The primary goal of this special issue is to present the vision, research, and dedicated efforts on the emerging technologies for vehicular communication networks.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Architecture and optimization in software defined vehicular networks
• Resource management and QoS provisioning in NFV enabled vehicular networks
• Drone integrated vehicular networks
• 5G assisted vehicular networks
• Sustainable and green vehicular networks
• Vehicular networks with fog computing
• Integration of vehicular networks with smart cities
• Big data for vehicular networks
• Security and privacy