Internet of Vehicles in Big Data Era

As the rapid development of automotive telematics, modern vehicles are expected to be connected through heterogeneous radio access technologies and are able to exchange massive information with their surrounding environment. By significantly expanding the network scale and conducting both real-time and long-term information processing, the traditional Vehicular AdHoc Networks (VANETs) are evolving to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises efficient and intelligent prospect for the future transportation system. On the other hand, vehicles are not only consuming but also generating a huge amount and enormous types of data, which is referred to as Big Data. In this article, we first investigate the relationship between IoV and big data in vehicular environment, mainly on how IoV supports the transmission, storage, computing of the big data, and how IoV benefits from big data in terms of IoV characterization, performance evaluation and big data assisted communication protocol design. We then investigate the application of IoV big data in autonomous vehicles. Finally, the emerging issues of the big data enabled IoV are discussed.