Does the IV need to be known by AES (CBC mode)?
The initialization vector is XORed against the first plaintext block before encryption in CBC mode, as shown in the Wikipedia article on block cipher modes. After the first block is decrypted, you still have an intermediate value which has been XORed with the plaintext — without this, you have little hope of recovering the plaintext. However, you do not need the IV to decrypt subsequent blocks.

You could perform CBC in a way that would remove the need to know the initialization vector (note: this is not recommended or encouraged, just pointing it out for the novelty). If you use a null IV and use a random value for the first block of plaintext, you can discard this value and only transmit the ciphertext. Note that this actually gains you nothing, because now the ciphertext is one whole block longer!