Why is Internet of Autonomous Vehicles not as Plug and Play as We Think ? Lessons to Be Learnt From Present Internet and Future Directions

The recent race for autonomous or ‘driverless’ vehicles, has spawned a lot of research in the area of Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs). With the advent of the latest technology fueled by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can now determine the best possible route to a destination based on the current traffic situation and take dynamic driving decisions accordingly, while preventing accidents. Field trials for single autonomous vehicles have been largely successful. However, as more autonomous vehicles will be added to the intelligent transport networks, current research is now centered around their synergistic coexistence in the offering of network-centric and user-centric services. This development is governed by borrowing several concepts from the legacy Internet to address the problems of IAVs. In this paper, we present an extensive overview of the research challenges in the IAVs. Moreover, our contributions in this paper are that (i) We show how the network-oriented cooperative client-server model will give way to a more unorthodox and ‘selfish’ decentralized and peer-to-peer (P2P) model, for example in the offering of navigation services on the IAV. (ii) We discuss how centralized architecture will give way to more distributed architectures for real-time information propagation over the IAV. (iii) We discuss how network-centric policies will begin to shift to user-centric under more beneficial revenue models by offering network-assisted quality of service (QoS) provisioning. (iv) We discuss in detail how vehicle traffic grooming in the IAV would present as much of a challenge as in the legacy Internet. (v) We discuss the disruptive role of value-added services on the IAV, and (iv) Finally, we discuss the problem of cyber threats in the IAV just as in the legacy Internet.