Unlimited and seamless coverage as well as ultra-reliable and low-latency communications are vital for connected vehicles, in particular for new use cases like autonomous driving and vehicle platooning. In this paper, we propose a novel Space-Air-Ground integrated vehicular network (SAGiven) architecture to gracefully integrate the multi-dimensional and multi-scale context-information and network resources from satellites, High-Altitude Platform stations (HAPs), low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and terrestrial cellular communication systems. One of the key features of the SAGiven is the reconfigurability of heterogeneous network functions as well as network resources. We first give a comprehensive review of the key challenges of this new architecture and then provide some up-to-date solutions on those challenges. Specifically, the solutions will cover the following topics: (1) space-air-ground integrated network reconfiguration under dynamic space resources constraints; (2) multi-dimensional sensing and efficient integration of multi-dimensional context information; (3) real-time, reliable, and secure communications among vehicles and between vehicles and the SAGiven platform; and (4) a holistic integration and demonstration of the SAGiven. Finally, it is concluded that the SAGiven can play a key role in future autonomous driving and Internet-of-Vehicles applications.

This paper describes a two-level cross-talked admission control mechanism that guarantees quality of service (QoS) requirements for multimedia applications over wireless local area networks (WLANs). An enhanced distributed channel access analytical model is used to compute the maximum number of admitted users according to the QoS requirements and the packet arrival characters. Then, some channel resources are reserved for handoff calls based on the maximum number of admitted users and the call-level traffic model. The channel utilization ratio is also measured to reflect the current system traffic load. The maximum number of admitted users and the channel utilization ratio are used for admission control for applications with QoS requirements in the call level and for rate control of best effort applications in the packet level using the p -nonacknowledgement scheme. Thus, the QoS requirements are statistically guaranteed while the system is efficiently utilized. Simulations validate the effectiveness of this mechanism to guarantee the QoS and bandwidth utilization.

Cochannel interference introduced by frequency reuse under space division multiple access can be reduced by controlling the frequency sharing according to the users’ spatial separability. The system avoids placing highly correlated users in space into the same spatial multiplexing group. This paper describes a user spatial compatibility evaluation criterion based on channel matrix structure analysis. The interferences are evaluated using the distances between subspaces spanned by the users’ channel matrixes. The analysis considers row space and column space. Simulation results show that the row space distance criterion significantly outperforms other criteria because it fully utilizes the information from the users’ channel matrixes. As the dimensions of the users’ channel matrixes increase, the matrix structure analysis-based criteria become even more efficient.