Guest editorial

The new era of Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the evolution of conventional vehicle ad hoc networks (VANET) into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigm. According to recent predictions, 25 billion of “things” will be connected to the Internet by 2020 among which vehicles will constitute a significant portion. The difference of the vehicle concept in VANET and IoV makes these two scenarios essentially different in the device, communications, networking, and services aspects. In VANET, a vehicle is mainly considered as a node to disseminate messages among vehicles. In the IoV paradigm, each vehicle is considered as a smart object equipped with a powerful multisensor platform, communications technologies, computation units, and Internet protocol (IP)-based connectivity to the Internet and to other vehicles either directly or indirectly. In addition, a vehicle in IoV is envisioned as a multi-communication model, enabling the interactions between intravehicle components, vehicles and vehicles, vehicles and road, and vehicles and people. IoV enables the acquisition and processing of large amount of data from versatile geographical areas via intelligent vehicles computing platforms to offer various categories of services for road safety and other services to drivers and passengers. There are many unprecedented challenges to realize IoV. A typical challenge is the big data processing and storage in IoV due to huge number of connected vehicles. Personal cloud and mobile cloud computing are envisioned to play important roles in dealing with the big data. The seamless integration of the social context into IoV is a promising approach as well as an important question to achieve green transport. In addition, the wide penetration of electrical vehicles in the near future will demand a very careful consideration on the intelligent interactions between IoV and the smart grid. Here, the interactions are not limited to the communications and computation, but the power load scheduling within the demand response management framework in the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) network. All these issues are being studied in academics, industries, and standardization organizations. This JOURNAL’s Special Issue publishes original contributions on IoV, sharing the research efforts and deployment challenges in this area, and discussing IoV challenges and key enabling techniques. Seven papers are published on original work on new network technologies for IoV, efficient and high throughput medium access control (MAC) layer technologies and scheduling algorithms, new content distribution mechanism, vehicle to grid services, and intrusion detection and privacy.