Age of Information, Latency, and Reliability in Intelligent Vehicular Networks

Autonomous driving and intelligent transportation have posed stringent requirements on different performance metrics of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications depending on the wireless service being carried. Such coexisting heterogeneous performance requirements bring about increasing challenge in managing modern vehicular networks. In this article, we categorize wireless vehicular traffic into two kinds, namely, status update service and data communication service, where in safety-related applications the former is concerned with age of information (AoI) while the latter cares about latency and reliability in general. Afterwards, we uncover the relationship among AoI, latency, and reliability, and propose a novel graphical packet delivery model that is powerful for analyzing AoI performance. To unify the AoI, latency, and reliability management for different services, we further develop an intelligent resource allocation framework validated by a quantitative case study. Finally, we explore key challenges and opportunities to address the coexistence of status update and data communication services in intelligent vehicular networks.