On the suitability of Device-to-Device communications for road traffic safety

In this paper, we explore recent Device-to-Device (D2D) research efforts and review their suitability to safety-critical Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications, such as cooperative or autonomous driving. Typical to the IoV environment is the high node mobility along with strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, especially in terms of delay and reliability. In addition, IoV applications require geomessaging capabilities with high degree of accuracy in particular in proximity awareness. Accordingly, we qualitatively assess the effectiveness of D2D approaches to cope with high mobility and precise geomessaging. Our review work shows that current approaches ignore high relative node mobility and accurate proximity measurements, and the crucial research challenges mainly are those related to maintaining the required QoS level in highly fluctuating D2D communications. This work is meant to be a roadmap towards adopting the emerging D2D technique for critical IoV communications.