Vehicular cloud computing: trends and challenges

Abstract

Recently, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) have attracted the attention of research communities, leading car manufacturers, and governments due to their potential applications and specific characteristics. Their research outcome was started with awareness between vehicles for collision avoidance and Internet access and then expanded to vehicular multimedia communications. Moreover, vehicles' high computation, communication, and storage resources set a ground for vehicular networks to deploy these applications in the near future. Nevertheless, on-board resources in vehicles are mostly underutilized. Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is developed to utilize the VANET resources efficiently and provide subscribers safe infotainment services. In this chapter, the authors perform a survey of state-of-the-art vehicular cloud computing as well as the existing techniques that utilize cloud computing for performance improvements in VANET. The authors then classify the VCC based on the applications, service types, and vehicular cloud organization. They present the detail for each VCC application and formation. Lastly, the authors discuss the open issues and research directions related to VANET cloud computing.