  Mobility is the backbone of urban life and a vital economic factor in the
development of the world. Rapid urbanization and the growth of mega-cities is
bringing dramatic changes in the capabilities of vehicles. Innovative solutions
like autonomy, electrification, and connectivity are on the horizon. How, then,
we can provide ubiquitous connectivity to the legacy and autonomous vehicles?
This paper seeks to answer this question by combining recent leaps of
innovation in network virtualization with remarkable feats of wireless
communications. To do so, this paper proposes a novel paradigm called the
Internet of autonomous vehicles (IoAV). We begin painting the picture of IoAV
by discussing the salient features, and applications of IoAV which is followed
by a detailed discussion on the key enabling technologies. Next, we describe
the proposed layered architecture of IoAV and uncover some critical functions
of each layer. This is followed by the performance evaluation of IoAV which
shows the significant advantage of the proposed architecture in terms of
transmission time and energy consumption. Finally, to best capture the benefits
of IoAV, we enumerate some social and technological challenges and explain how
some unresolved issues can disrupt the widespread use of autonomous vehicles in
the future.
