Integrating Vehicular Clouds For Supporting Smart Transportation Infrastructure

An emerging vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a network of connected vehicles which are communicating with each other and with roadside units (RSUs) exchanging useful information. As a result, road safety is increased, and complex traffic management is enabled. However, we are moving one step further and proposing the usage of vehicle resources, such as computing capabilities and data storage, for enabling vehicular clouds which can efficiently support smart transportation infrastructure. The main goal for establishing vehicular clouds is utilization of vast amounts of unused hardware resources available at vehicles for enabling and supporting smart transportation infrastructure. Vehicular clouds can enable additional distributed computing and storage resources to various groups of users, as well as introduce new use cases and applications. Recent vehicular cloud computing methods and models, as well as vehicular cloud computing architecture and services are explored in this paper. Based on the research and our work a new vehicular cloud computing architecture VANET-CC is proposed and elaborated. Furthermore, possible services for cloud computing are pointed out together with vehicle management in such clouds.