Future Communications and Energy Management in the Internet of Vehicles: Toward Intelligent Energy-Harvesting

As an emerging communication platform in the Internet of Things, IoV is promising to pave the way for the establishment of smart cities and provide support for various kinds of applications and services. Energy management in IoV has been attracting an upsurge of interest in both academia and industry. Currently, green IoV mainly focuses on two aspects: energy management of battery- enabled RSUs and EVs. However, these two issues are always resolved separately while ignoring their interactions. This standalone design may cause energy underutilization, a mismatch between traffic demands and energy supplies, as well as high deployment and sustainable costs for RSUs. Therefore, the integration of energy management between battery-enabled RSUs and EVs calls for comprehensive investigation. This article first provides an overview of several promising research fields for energy management in green IoV systems. Given the significance of efficient communications and energy management, we construct an intelligent energy-harvesting framework based on V2I communications in green IoV communication systems. Specifically, we develop a three-stage Stackelberg game to maximize the utilities of both RSUs and EVs in V2I communications. After that, a real-world trajectory-based performance evaluation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme. Finally, we identify and discuss some research challenges and open issues for energy management in green IoV systems.