Wireless Access for V2X Communications: Research, Challenges and Opportunities

Autonomous vehicles and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have started to become a reality in recent years. However, shortcomings of these early intelligent vehicles demonstrate a need to increase an intelligent vehicle’s perceptual bubble beyond the vehicle’s onboard sensors. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications is a technology intended to enable intelligent vehicles to increase their perceptive range via communication with the outside world, i.e., other vehicles, road users, and infrastructure. One of the critical layers of V2X communications is that of the underlying wireless access. There remains an open debate on which technology (or technologies) will ultimately be adopted as the de facto wireless access technology for V2X communications. Presently, a myriad of unconnected threads of work are being undertaken to this end, resulting in an unclear picture of the current state of wireless access for V2X communications. In this tutorial review, we collate current research on wireless access for V2X communications to showcase recent developments and the challenges facing candidate technologies. To allow the reader to engage with the debate, we present an overview of the field of V2X communications, its history, and standardisation. Following this, we provide an overview of the key candidate wireless access technologies that may enable V2X communications. Through this work, we aim to provide a comprehensive first step into the discipline of wireless access for V2X communications.