The interest that exists globally around the so-called intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has fostered a large amount of research activities aimed at developing new wireless communication technologies for the information exchange among vehicles on the move. The design of such technology gained an important momentum when in 1999 the American Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocated a 75 MHz bandwidth in the 5.9 GHz band for dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) systems. While the predominant technology for vehicular communications is based on radiofrequency, an alternative that is receiving increasing attention leans toward the use of visible light communication (VLC) technology. Furthermore, the solutions based on VLC technology can easily be extrapolated to underwater vehicular communications.

While the future ahead looks promising, the design of radio and optical transceivers for vehicular communications is not a trivial task, because the high speed at which the vehicles can move poses several new challenges that are not a concern for conventional mobile communication systems. For example, due to the rapidly changing propagation conditions that are typically found in vehicular communication environments, the Doppler shift effects and the nonstationary characteristics of the wireless channel become exacerbated. These issues can significantly affect the performance of transceivers that are not optimized to operate over highly time-varying channels. Proper channel models are therefore needed that provide insights into the physics of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) radio/optical reception and at the same time that lend themselves to mathematical and numerical system performance investigations.

In response to such a need, this special issue aims to serve as a forum for the identification of problems and research trends, the dissemination of novel results and ideas, and the discussion of hot topics in the area of channel modeling and simulation for vehicular communication systems. Prospective authors are welcome to submit original and high-quality papers in any of the topics of this special issue.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Channel modeling and simulation for IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V vehicular communication systems
• Channel modeling and simulation for vehicular communication systems based on VLC technology (e.g., systems based on applications of the IEEE 802.15.7 standard)
• Modeling and simulation of highly time-varying channels for railroad communications
• Modeling and simulation of nonstationary multipath fading channels
• Channel modeling and simulation for underwater vehicular communications
• Measurement-based channel modeling and novel sounding techniques for vehicular communications
• Hardware emulators for V2V and V2I channels