6G for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications: Enabling Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities

We are on the cusp of a new era of connected autonomous vehicles with unprecedented user experiences, tremendously improved road safety and air quality, highly diverse transportation environments and use cases, as well as a plethora of advanced applications. Realizing this grand vision requires a significantly enhanced vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication network which should be extremely intelligent and capable of concurrently supporting hyper-fast, ultra-reliable, and low-latency massive information exchange. It is anticipated that the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems will fulfill these requirements of the next-generation V2X. In this article, we outline a series of key enabling technologies from a range of domains, such as new materials, algorithms, and system architectures. Aiming for truly intelligent transportation systems, we envision that machine learning will play an instrumental role for advanced vehicular communication and networking. To this end, we provide an overview on the recent advances of machine learning in 6G vehicular networks. To stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, maturity, and enhancing areas of these technologies

On Adjacent Channel Interference-Aware Radio Resource Management for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Safety applications play an essential role in supporting traffic safety and efficiency in next generation vehicular networks. Typical safety applications require vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication with high reliability and low latency. The reliability of a communication link is mainly determined by the received interference, and broadly speaking, there are two types of interferences: co-channel interference (CCI) and adjacent channel interference (ACI). The CCI is cross-talk between transmitters scheduled in the same time-frequency slot, whereas ACI is interference due to leakage of transmit power outside the intended frequency slot. The ACI is typically not a problem in cellular communication since interference is dominated by CCI due to spectrum re-usage. However, ACI is a significant problem in near-far situations, i.e., when the channel gain from the interferer to receiver is high compared to the channel gain from the intended transmitter. The near-far situation is more common in V2V broadcast communication scenario due to high dynamic range of the channel gain and penetration loss by intermediate vehicles. This thesis investigates the impact of ACI on V2V communication and methods to mitigate it by proper radio resource management (RRM), i.e., scheduling and power control.In [Paper A], we first study ACI models for various transmission schemes and its impact on V2V communication. We propose a problem formulation for a) optimal scheduling as a Boolean linear programming (BLP) problem and b) optimal power control as a mixed Boolean linear programming (MBLP) problem. The objective of the problem formulation is to maximize the connectivity among VUEs in the network. Near-optimal schedules and power values are computed by solving first a) and then b) for smaller size instances of the problem. To handle larger-size instances of the problem, heuristic scheduling and power control algorithms with less computational complexity are proposed. We also propose a simple distributed block interleaver scheduler (BIS), which can be used as a baseline method.In [Paper B], we formulate the joint scheduling and power control problem as an MBLP to maximize the connectivity among VUEs. A column generation method is proposed to address the scalability of the network, i.e., to reduce the computational complexity of the joint problem. Moreover, the scheduling problem is observed to be numerically sensitive due to the high dynamic range of channel values and adjacent channel interference ratio (ACIR) values. Therefore, a novel method is proposed to reduce the sensitivity and compute a numerically stable optimal solution at the price of increased computational complexity.In [Paper C], we extend the RRM problem formulation to include various objectives, such as maximizing connectivity/throughput and minimizing age of information (AoI). In order to account for the fairness, we also formulate the problem to improve the worst-case throughput, connectivity, and AoI of a link in the network. All the problems are formulated as MBLP problems. In order to support a large V2V network, a clustering algorithm is proposed whose computational complexity scale well with the network size. Moreover, a multihop distributed scheduling scheme is proposed to handle zero channel state information (CSI) case

6G for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications: Enabling technologies, challenges, and opportunities

We are on the cusp of a new era of connected autonomous vehicles with unprecedented user experiences, tremendously improved road safety and air quality, highly diverse transportation environments and use cases, and a plethora of advanced applications. Realizing this grand vision requires a significantly enhanced vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication network that should be extremely intelligent and capable of concurrently supporting hyperfast, ultrareliable, and low-latency massive information exchange. It is anticipated that the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems will fulfill these requirements of the next-generation V2X. In this article, we outline a series of key enabling technologies from a range of domains, such as new materials, algorithms, and system architectures. Aiming for truly intelligent transportation systems, we envision that machine learning (ML) will play an instrumental role in advanced vehicular communication and networking. To this end, we provide an overview of the recent advances of ML in 6G vehicular networks. To stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, maturity, and enhancing areas of these technologies