Published
2026
Type of Work
Article
Abstract
Connected autonomous vehicles are expected to become increasingly widespread in the coming decade, fundamentally transforming the utilization of communication networks across urban environments. These vehicles are highly data-intensive and continuously exchange information with surrounding vehicles, infrastructure, and cloud services to enable perception, decision making, and control. This constant connectivity imposes unprecedented loads on existing communication technologies such as mobile 5G broadband networks, which must handle massive volumes of real-time data transmission with low latency and high reliability requirements. This study examines how large scale deployment of connected autonomous vehicles could affect the performance and scalability of 5G networks, with a focus on bandwidth utilization under dense vehicular connectivity. In addition, it explores the potential role of 5G and beyond communication technologies, which are expected to become the dominant network infrastructure during the era of widespread connected autonomous vehicle adoption, in addressing these challenges. The findings emphasize the need for adaptive network architectures to ensure seamless and reliable communication for future autonomous transportation systems.
Citation
Yavari, A., Bagha, H., Foroughimehr, N., & Branch, P. (2026). 6G and autonomous vehicles: The future of intelligent transportation. In 2026 40th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN) (pp. 861–866). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOIN68469.2026.11480639