Abstract
This chapter presents a thorough investigation on current vehicular networking architectures (access technologies and overlay networks) and their (r)evolution towards the 5G era. The main driving force behind vehicular networking is to increase safety, with several other applications exploiting this ecosystem for traffic efficiency and infotainment provision. The most prominent existing candidates for vehicular networking are based on dedicated short range communications (DSRC) and cellular (4G) communications. In addition, the maturity of cloud computing has accommodated the invasion of vehicular space with cloud-based services. Nevertheless, current architectures can not meet the latency requirements of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications in highly congested and mobile environments. The future trend of autonomous driving pushes current networking architectures further to their limits with hard real-time requirements. Vehicular networks in 5G have to address five major challenges that affect current architectures: congestion, mobility management, backhaul networking, air interface and security. As networking transforms from simple connectivity provision, to service and content provision, fog computing approaches with caching and pre-fetching improve significantly the performance of the networks. The cloudification of network resources though software defined networking (SDN)/network function virtualization (NFV) principles, is another promising enabler for efficient vehicular networking in 5G. Finally, new wireless access mechanisms combined with current DSRC and 4G will enable to bring the vehicles in the cloud.