From today's VANETs to tomorrow's planning and the bets for the day after

After more than a decade of research and investments, the first release of standards for cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) is going to be finalized. Preliminary field-trials have already demonstrated the high potentials of short-range wireless communication in vehicular environments for many basic day-one C-ITS applications (e.g., hazardous location and road works warnings). In the meanwhile, stakeholders are working on Release 2 of the standards to augment the portfolio of offered services with increased cooperative awareness and driving automation. The related higher C-ITS market penetration and the strict latency and robustness requirements of after day-one applications (e.g., platooning and autonomous driving) are going to question the capability of the current standard technology, mainly based on IEEE 802.11, to cope with scalability and congestion issues at the radio access level.In this paper, we analyze the topic of vehicular networks in the context of C-ITS from an evolutionary point of view, scanning early concepts and enabling technologies, current status and future opportunities, with a look on a future fully networked vehicular environment.