  Connected and automated vehicles will enable advanced traffic safety and
efficiency applications thanks to the dynamic exchange of information between
vehicles, and between vehicles and infrastructure nodes. Connected vehicles can
utilize IEEE 802.11p for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure
(V2I) communications. However, a widespread deployment of connected vehicles
and the introduction of connected automated driving applications will notably
increase the bandwidth and scalability requirements of vehicular networks. This
paper proposes to address these challenges through the adoption of
heterogeneous V2V communications in multi-link and multi-RAT vehicular
networks. In particular, the paper proposes the first distributed (and
decentralized) context-aware heterogeneous V2V communications algorithm that is
technology and application agnostic, and that allows each vehicle to
autonomously and dynamically select its communications technology taking into
account its application requirements and the communication context conditions.
This study demonstrates the potential of heterogeneous V2V communications, and
the capability of the proposed algorithm to satisfy the vehicles' application
requirements while approaching the estimated upper bound network capacity.
