A survey on vehicular cloud computing

Md Whaiduzzaman, Mehdi Sookhak, Abdullah Gani, Rajkumar Buyya
2014 Journal of Network and Computer Applications  
Vehicular networking has become a significant research area due to its specific features and applications such as standardization, efficient traffic management, road safety and infotainment. Vehicles are expected to carry relatively more communication systems, on board computing facilities, storage and increased sensing power. Hence, several technologies have been deployed to maintain and promote Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Recently, a number of solutions were proposed to address
more » ... he challenges and issues of vehicular networks. Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is one of the solutions. VCC is a new hybrid technology that has a remarkable impact on traffic management and road safety by instantly using vehicular resources, such as computing, storage and internet for decision making. This paper presents the state-of-theart survey of vehicular cloud computing. Moreover, we present a taxonomy for vehicular cloud in which special attention has been devoted to the extensive applications, cloud formations, key management, inter cloud communication systems, and broad aspects of privacy and security issues. Through an extensive review of the literature, we design an architecture for VCC, itemize the properties required in vehicular cloud that support this model. We compare this mechanism with normal Cloud Computing (CC) and discuss open research issues and future directions. By reviewing and analyzing literature, we found that VCC is a technologically feasible and economically viable technological shifting paradigm for converging intelligent vehicular networks towards autonomous traffic, vehicle control and perception systems. Advances in vehicular technology have provided resources such as fixed storage devices, better computing power, cognitive radios, and different types of programmable sensor nodes. By using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), intelligent applications enhance ITS and can improve both driving safety and traffic efficiency (Fonseca and Vazão, 2012) . The arrival of mobile internet in vehicles brings together the innovative and, widely divergent benefits of the internet, and such developments have a tremendous social impact (Goggin, 2012) . Therefore, in the futures, cars and vehicles will be ubiquitously furnished with communication, computing and sensing devices, and universal networks will make the internet available on the move. Thus, the driving experience will be more enjoyable, comfortable, safe and environmental friendly. Eventually, the billboards of our highways will be exchanged for in-vehicle advertising, where the driver can choose advertisement based on their needs. However, the remarkable array of on board computing abilities present in our vehicles is most likely not utilized by the applications mentioned above (Karagiannis et al. , 2011) . Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a new paradigm that can be used by vehicle drivers to leverage services as a utility by a pay as you go model, and can process a large amount of data on demand anytime from anywhere. The drivers can use their mobile devices to connect to the cloud via the internet. MCC provides the essential environment and foundation to integrate platforms and technology that will monitor road safety by processing sensor network data using different mobile cloud architectures, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS). However, the mobile devices suffer from computing resources limitations (resource and battery restriction, processing time (Shiraz et al. , 2012) . In addition, uploading real-time information on the cloud such as traffic jam or accident situation, by using the internet is costly and time consuming (Fernando et al. , 2012). Vehicular Cloud Computing is a new technological shifting, which takes advantage of cloud computing to serve the drivers of VANETs with a pay as you go model. Thus, the objectives of VCC are to provide several computational services at low cost to the vehicle drivers; to minimize traffic congestion, accidents, travel time and environmental pollution; and to ensure uses of low energy and real time services of software, platforms, and infrastructure with QOS to drivers (Gerla, 2012) . VCC can address the convergence of ITS and the tremendous computing and storage capabilities of MCC. Furthermore, VCC provides a technically feasible incorporation of the ubiquitous sensing of WSN, ITS and MCC for better road safety and secured intelligent urban traffic systems (Tekbiyik and Uysal-Biyikoglu, 2011, Wang et al. , 2011). We are motivated because the communication, storage and computing resources available in the vehicles are generally underutilized. Combining these resources meaningfully will have a momentous influence on society. As such the underutilized vehicular resources including computing power, net connections and storage facilities can be pooled with those of other drivers on the road or rented to customers, similar to the way in which the resources of the present conventional cloud are provided. With current technology, Vehicular Clouds are technologically feasible and economically viable and will be the next paradigm shift. They will provide many benefits, including societal and technological impacts. The idea of a Vehicular Cloud is recent(Olariu and Weigle, 2009) and our emphasis is on the prospective applications and significant aspects of research challenges. In this paper, we highlight Vehicular Clouds (Olariu, Hristov, 2013 , Olariu, Khalil, 2011 , an extension of conventional Cloud Computing with several new dimensions. Our aim in this paper is to help readers better understand the fundamental vehicular cloud computing mechanisms and point out the potential applications for improving vehicular network and road safety. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of vehicular networking and a comparative study between CC and VCC. In addition, we explain the VCC architecture, autonomous cloud formation and the extensive application scenario. Each vehicle in VCC can communicate to the other vehicles or the network infrastructures by using the vehicle to vehicle or the vehicle to infrastructure network communication. We describe a key management method to provide a secure communication channel in the vehicular network. Furthermore, we categorize the vehicular networks based on the security issues and solutions. The security and privacy of VCC, the research challenges and open issues are also discussed. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the vehicular network, which is the key component in vehicular clouds. Section 3 offers an overview of cloud computing, and section 4 provides an overview of VCC and services that motivated the vision of vehicular clouds. Section 5 focuses on the applications and possible uses of VCC and some distinguishing features. Security, privacy and key management issues are discussed in section 6, and section 7 discusses open issues and challenges in research. Finally, section 8 concludes with future remarks and new research directions.
doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2013.08.004 fatcat:7bh5x3a775bqpm367xtatxjvwy