Wireless communication is a basis of the vision of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). Given the heterogeneity of both wireless communication technologies and CAV applications, one question that is critical to technology road-mapping and policy making is which communication technology is more suitable for a specific CAV application. Focusing on the technical aspect of this question, we present a multi-scale spatiotemporal perspective of wireless communication technologies as well as canonical CAV applications in active safety, fuel economy and emission control, vehicle automation, and vehicular infotainment. Our analysis shows that CAV applications in the regime of small spatiotemporal scale communication requirements are best supported by V2V communications, applications in the regime of large spatiotemporal scale communication requirements are better supported by cellular communications, and applications in the regime of small spatial scale but medium-to-large temporal scale can be supported by both V2V and cellular communications and provide the opportunity of leveraging heterogeneous communication resources.
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