Green Communications for Future Vehicular Networks: Data Compression Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges

Cellular vehicular networks constitute an important part of future vehicular communication systems. However, they pose challenges to fulfill vehicles with demands for the transmission rates of various network services while achieving satisfactory costs and energy consumption. The cloud radio access network architecture is considered as a green wireless access network framework that reduces the deployment costs of base stations while achieving resource sharing and dynamic scheduling to lower energy consumption, and thus will greatly improve spectrum efficiency. in this article, we first propose a cloud vehicular radio access network (C-VRAN) architecture to enable rapid network innovation for green vehicular communications. Specifically, we propose a vehicular network framework consisting of centralized processing, collaborative radio, real-time cloud computing, and data compression functions. Then, the design and the potential benefits of C-VRAN are presented in detail. Moreover, an effective data compression approach for the proposed architecture is proposed to meet low-distortion compression for cellular vehicular network data, thereby improving fiber resource utilization. Finally, we briefly discuss key challenges and solutions for future green vehicular communications.