Vehicular Edge Clouds (VECs) is a new distributed processing paradigm that exploits the revolution in the processing capabilities of vehicles to offer energy efficient services and improved QoS. In this paper we tackle the problem of processing allocation in a cloud-fog-VEC architecture by developing a joint optimization Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to minimize power consumption, propagation delay, and queuing delay. The results show that while VEC processing can reduce the power consumption and propagation delay, VEC processing can increase the queuing delay because of the low data rate connectivity between the vehicles and the data source nodes.
Modern vehicles equipped with on-board units (OBU) are playing an essential role in the smart city revolution. The vehicular processing resources, however, are not used to their fullest potential. The concept of vehicular clouds is proposed to exploit the underutilized vehicular resources to supplement cloud computing services to relieve the burden on cloud data centers and improve quality of service. In this paper we introduce a vehicular cloud architecture supported by fixed edge computing nodes and the central cloud. A mixed integer linear programming (MLP) model is developed to optimize th…
This paper investigates distributed processing in Vehicular Edge Cloud (VECs), where a group of vehicles in a car park, at a charging station or at a road traffic intersection, cluster and form a temporary vehicular cloud by combining their computational resources in the cluster. We investigated the problem of energy efficient processing task allocation in VEC by developing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to minimize power consumption by optimizing the allocation of different processing tasks to the available network resources, cloud resources, fog resources and vehicular proce…
The rapid development of vehicles on-board units and the proliferation of autonomous vehicles in modern cities create a potential for a new fog computing paradigm, referred to as vehicular fog computing (VFC). In this paper, we propose an architecture that integrates a vehicular fog (VF) composed of vehicles clustered in a parking lot with a fixed fog node at the access network and the central cloud. We investigate the problem of energy efficient software matching in the VF considering different approaches to deploy software packages in vehicles.
This article presents a concise view of vehicular clouds that incorporates various vehicular cloud models, which have been proposed, to date. Essentially, they all extend the traditional cloud and its utility computing functionalities across the entities in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). These entities include fixed road-side units (RSUs), on-board units (OBUs) embedded in the vehicle and personal smart devices of the driver and passengers. Cumulatively, these entities yield abundant processing, storage, sensing and communication resources. However, vehicular clouds require novel resour…
For in-vehicle application, the vehicles with different speeds have different delay requirements. However, vehicle speeds have not been extensively explored, which may cause mismatching between vehicle speed and its allocated computation and wireless resource. In this paper, we propose a vehicle speed aware task offloading and resource allocation strategy, to decrease the energy cost of executing tasks without exceeding the delay constraint. First, we establish the vehicle speed aware delay constraint model based on different speeds and task types. Then, the delay and energy cost of task execu…
Vehicular edge computing is a new distributed processing architecture that exploits the revolution in the processing capabilities of vehicles to provide energy efficient services and low delay for Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems. Edge computing relies on a set of distributed processing nodes (i.e. vehicles) that are located close to the end user. In this paper, we consider a vehicular edge cloud (VEC) consisting of a set of vehicle clusters that form a temporal vehicular cloud by combining their computational resources in the cluster. We tackle the problem of processing allocation in th…
as a novel client-based method for resource-efficient opportunistic transmission of delay-tolerant vehicular sensor data. BS-CB applies a hybrid approach which brings together all major machine learning disciplines - supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning - in order to autonomously schedule vehicular sensor data transmissions with respect to the expected resource efficiency. Within a comprehensive real world performance evaluation in the public cellular networks of three Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), it is found that 1) The average uplink data rate is improved by 125%-195% 2) …
Roadside units (RSUs), which have strong computing capability and are close to vehicle nodes, have been widely used to process delay- and computation-intensive tasks of vehicle nodes. However, due to their high mobility, vehicles may drive out of the coverage of RSUs before receiving the task processing results. In this paper, we propose a mobile edge computing-assisted vehicular network, where vehicles can offload their tasks to a nearby vehicle via a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) link or a nearby RSU via a vehicle-to-infrastructure link. These tasks are also migrated by a V2V link or an infrastru…
Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is envisioned as a promising solution to process the explosive tasks in autonomous vehicular networks. In the VFC system, task offloading is the key technique to process the computation-intensive tasks efficiently. In the task offloading, the task is transmitted to the VFC system according to the 802.11p standard and processed by the computation resources in the VFC system. The delay of task offloading, consisting of the transmission delay and computing delay, is extremely critical especially for some delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, the long-term reward…
In the era of Internet of Things, all components in intelligent transportation systems will be connected to improve transport safety, relieve traffic congestion, reduce air pollution and enhance the comfort of driving. The vision of all vehicles connected poses a significant challenge to the collection and storage of large amounts of traffic-related data. In this article, we propose to integrate cloud computing into vehicular networks such that the vehicles can share computation resources, storage resources and bandwidth resources. The proposed architecture includes a vehicular cloud, a roadsi…
Future vehicles will have rich computing resources to support autonomous driving and be connected by wireless technologies. Vehicular fog networks (VeFN) have thus emerged to enable computing resource sharing via computation task offloading, providing wide range of fog applications. However, the high mobility of vehicles makes it hard to guarantee the delay that accounts for both communication and computation throughout the whole task offloading procedure. In this article, we first review the state-of-the-art of task offloading in VeFN, and argue that mobility is not only an obstacle for timel…
Next-generation networks, based on SDN and NFV, are expected to support a wide array of services, including vehicular safety applications. These services come with strict delay constraints, and our goal in this paper is to ascertain to which extent SDN/NFV-based networks are able to meet them. To this end, we build and emulate a vehicular collision detection system, using the popular Mininet and Docker tools, on a real-world topology with mobility information. Using different core network topologies and open-source SDN controllers, we measure (i) the delay with which vehicle beacons are proces…
This letter studies an ultra-reliable low latency communication problem focusing on a vehicular edge computing network in which vehicles either fetch and synthesize images recorded by surveillance cameras or acquire the synthesized image from an edge computing server. The notion of risk-sensitive in financial mathematics is leveraged to define a reliability measure, and the studied problem is formulated as a risk minimization problem for each vehicle's end-to-end (E2E) task fetching and offloading delays. Specifically, by resorting to a joint utility and policy estimation-based learning algori…
Modern vehicles are equipped with more and more sophisticated computer modules, which need to periodically download files from the cloud, such as security certificates, digital maps, system firmwares, etc. Collaborative content distribution utilizes V2V communication to distribute large files across the vehicular networks. It has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of cellular-based communication such as 4G LTE. In this report, we have conducted a simulation study to verify the feasibility of a hybrid cellular and V2V collaborative content distribution network. In our simulation, a …
Facilitating the revolution for smarter cities, vehicles are getting smarter and equipped with more resources to go beyond transportation functionality. On-Board Units (OBU) are efficient computers inside vehicles that serve safety and non-safety based applications. However, much of these resources are underutilised. On the other hand, more users are relying now on cloud computing which is becoming costly and energy consuming. In this paper, we develop a Mixed Integer linear Programming (MILP) model that optimizes the allocation of processing demands in an architecture that encompasses the veh…
Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) is emerging as a new solution for monitoring urban environments such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and air pollution. One of the crucial factors that determine the service quality of urban monitoring applications is the delivery delay of sensing data packets in the VSN. In this paper, we study the problem of routing data packets with minimum delay in the VSN, by exploiting i) vehicle traffic statistics, ii) anycast routing and iii) knowledge of future trajectories of vehicles such as buses. We first introduce a novel road network graph model that incorpor…
With the emerging of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems and software defined networks, not only the performance of vehicular networks could be improved but also new applications of vehicular networks are required by future vehicles, e.g., pilotless vehicles. To meet requirements from intelligent transportation systems, a new vehicular network architecture integrated with 5G mobile communication technologies and software defined network is proposed in this paper. Moreover, fog cells have been proposed to flexibly cover vehicles and avoid frequently handover between vehicles …
In this paper, we focus on the performance analysis of a semi-persistent scheduling scheme for vehicular safety communications, motivated by the Mode 4 medium access control protocol in 3GPP Release 14 for Cellular-V2X. An analytical model is built and a fixed point method is used to calculate the collision probability and average delay in both fully connected and partially connected cases under the assumption of perfect PHY performance. We use Monte Carlo simulation to verify the results obtained in the analytical model. The simulation results show that our analytical model can give a good es…
Vehicular communication channels are characterized by a non-stationary time- and frequency-selective fading process due to rapid changes in the environment. The non-stationary fading process can be characterized by assuming local stationarity for a region with finite extent in time and frequency. For this finite region the wide-sense stationarity and uncorrelated-scattering (WSSUS) assumption holds approximately and we are able to calculate a time and frequency dependent local scattering function (LSF). In this paper, we estimate the LSF from a large set of measurements collected in the DRIVEW…
In the last few years, the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has come to be an important area of research. Significant research has been conducted to improve the performance of VANETS. One output of further research conducted on VANET is the Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN). It is an application of the mobile DTN where nodes relay messages in the network using a store-carry-forward approach. Due to its high mobility, it suffers frequent disconnections and also congestions at nodes which leads to message drops. To minimize the rate of message drops and so optimize the probability of messa…
The introduction of cloud data centres has opened new possibilities for the storage and processing of data, augmenting the limited capabilities of peripheral devices. Large data centres tend to be located away from the end users which increases latency and power consumption in the interconnecting networks. These limitations led to the introduction of edge processing where small distributed data centres or fog units are located at the edge of the network close to the end user. Vehicles can have substantial processing capabilities, often un-used, in their on-board-units (OBUs). These can be used…
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) facilitate vehicles to broadcast beacon messages to ensure road safety. The rogue nodes in VANETs broadcast malicious information leading to potential hazards, including the collision of vehicles. Previous researchers used either cryptography, trust values, or past vehicle data to detect rogue nodes, but they suffer from high processing delay, overhead, and false-positive rate (FPR). We propose fog-based rogue nodes detection (F-RouND), a fog computing scheme, which dynamically creates a fog utilizing the on-board units (OBUs) of all vehicles in the region fo…
Many Internet of things (IoT) applications have been developed and implemented on unreliable wireless networks like the Delay tolerant network (DTN), however, efficient data transfer in DTN is still an important issue for the IoT applications. One of the application areas of DTN is Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN) where the network faces communication disruption due to lack of end-to-end relay route. It is challenging as some of the nodes show selfish behavior to preserve their resources like memory, and energy level and become non-cooperative. In this article, an Honesty based Democrat…
The increasing availability of on-board processing units in vehicles has led to a new promising mobile edge computing (MEC) concept which integrates desirable features of clouds and VANETs under the concept of vehicular clouds (VC). In this paper we propose an architecture that integrates VC with metro fog nodes and the central cloud to ensure service continuity. We tackle the problem of energy efficient resource allocation in this architecture by developing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to minimize power consumption by optimizing the assignment of different tasks to the avai…
Intelligent connected vehicles equipped with wireless sensors, intelligent control system, and communication devices are expected to commercially launch and emerge on road in short-term. These smart vehicles are able to partially/fully drive themselves; collect data from sensors, make and execute decisions based on that data; communicate with other vehicles, pedestrians, and nodes installed on the road; and provide infotainment and value-added services, such as broadband transmission of ultra-high definition video, files/apps downloading and uploading, online gaming, access to social media, au…
We propose Roadside Unit (RSU) Clouds as a novel way to offer non-safety application with QoS for VANETs. The architecture of RSU Clouds is delineated, and consists of traditional RSUs and specialized micro-datacenters and virtual machines (VMs) using Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN offers the flexibility to migrate or replicate virtual services and reconfigure the data forwarding rules dynamically. However, frequent changes to service hosts and data flows not only result in degradation of services, but are also costly for service providers. In this paper, we use Mininet to analyze and …
Graph jobs represent a wide variety of computation-intensive tasks in which computations are represented by graphs consisting of components (denoting either data sources or data processing) and edges (corresponding to data flows between the components). Recent years have witnessed dramatic growth in smart vehicles and computation-intensive graph jobs, which pose new challenges to the provision of efficient services related to the Internet of Vehicles. Fortunately, vehicular clouds formed by a collection of vehicles, which allows jobs to be offloaded among vehicles, can substantially alleviate …
Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) as the basic infrastructure can facilitate applications and services of connected vehicles (CVs). Cognitive radio (CR) technology is an effective supplement and enhancement for VANETs. It can reduce the impact of deficiency of spectrum resource in VANETs. Although CR-VANETs can utilize the unused licensed spectrum effectively, the distributed nature of CR-VANETs may open a door for different attacks, such as spectrum sensing data falsification attack. In this paper, we propose a joint RSU and vehicle-based light-weighted cloud for CR-VANETs. Based on this clo…
In this paper, we investigate joint vehicle association and multi-dimensional resource management in a vehicular network assisted by multi-access edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). To efficiently manage the available spectrum, computing, and caching resources for the MEC-mounted base station and UAVs, a resource optimization problem is formulated and carried out at a central controller. Considering the overlong solving time of the formulated problem and the sensitive delay requirements of vehicular applications, we transform the optimization problem using reinforcement lea…
China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoTs), an increasing number of computation intensive or delay sensitive biomedical data processing and analysis tasks are produced in vehicles, bringing more and more challenges to the biometric monitoring of drivers. Edge computing is a new paradigm to solve these challenges by offloading tasks from the resource-limited vehicles to Edge Servers (ESs) in Road Side Units (RSUs). However, most of the traditional offloading schedules for vehicular networks concentrate on the edge, while some tasks may be too comple…
Fixed edge processing has become a key feature of 5G networks, while playing a key role in reducing latency, improving energy efficiency and introducing flexible compute resource utilization on-demand with added cost savings. Autonomous vehicles are expected to possess significantly more on-board processing capabilities and with improved connectivity. Vehicles continue to be used for a fraction of the day, and as such there is a potential to increase processing capacity by utilizing these resources while vehicles are in short-term and long-term car parks, in roads and at road intersections. Su…
This paper presents a novel Advanced Activity-Aware (AAA) scheme to optimize and improve Multi-Channel Operations based on the IEEE 1609.4 standard in wireless access vehicular environments (WAVE). The proposed scheme relies on the awareness of the vehicular safety load to dynamically find an optimal setup for switching between service channel intervals (SCHI) and control channel intervals (CCHI). SCHI are chosen for non-critical applications (e.g. infotainment), while CCHI are utilized for critical applications (e.g. safety-related). We maximize the channel utilization without sacrificing oth…
Heterogeneous Vehicular NETworks (HetVNETs) can meet various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for intelligent transport system (ITS) services by integrating different access networks coherently. However, the current network architecture for HetVNET cannot efficiently deal with the increasing demands of rapidly changing network landscape. Thanks to the centralization and flexibility of the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN), soft-defined networking (SDN) can conveniently be applied to support the dynamic nature of future HetVNET functions and various applications while reducing the ope…
In a vehicular edge computing (VEC) system, vehicles can share their surplus computation resources to provide cloud computing services. The highly dynamic environment of the vehicular network makes it challenging to guarantee the task offloading delay. To this end, we introduce task replication to the VEC system, where the replicas of a task are offloaded to multiple vehicles at the same time, and the task is completed upon the first response among replicas. First, the impact of the number of task replicas on the offloading delay is characterized, and the optimal number of task replicas is app…
Vehicular cloud computing has emerged as a promising solution to fulfill users' demands on processing computation-intensive applications in modern driving environments. Such applications are commonly represented by graphs consisting of components and edges. However, encouraging vehicles to share resources poses significant challenges owing to users' selfishness. In this paper, an auction-based graph job allocation problem is studied in vehicular cloud-assisted networks considering resource reutilization. Our goal is to map each buyer (component) to a feasible seller (virtual machine) while max…
Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing road safety. Routing of messages in VANET is challenging due to packet delays arising from high mobility of vehicles, frequently changing topology, and high density of vehicles, leading to frequent route breakages and packet losses. Previous researchers have used either mobility in vehicular fog computing or cloud computing to solve the routing issue, but they suffer from large packet delays and frequent packet losses. We propose Dynamic Fog for Connected Vehicles (DFCV), a fog computing based scheme which dynam…
In the recent years, many solutions for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication were proposed to overcome failure problems (also known as dead ends). This paper proposes a novel framework for V2V failure recovery using Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. Based on the unified Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) architecture, LTE-based D2D mechanisms can improve V2V dead ends failure recovery delays. This new paradigm of hybrid V2V-D2D communications overcomes the limitations of traditional V2V routing techniques. According to NS2 simulation results, the proposed hybrid model decreases th…
Vehicular communication channels are characterized by a non-stationary time- and frequency-selective fading process due to fast changes in the environment. We characterize the distribution of the envelope of the first delay bin in vehicle-to-vehicle channels by means of its Rician $K$-factor. We analyze the time-frequency variability of this channel parameter using vehicular channel measurements at 5.6 GHz with a bandwidth of 240 MHz for safety-relevant scenarios in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). This data enables a frequency-variability analysis from an IEEE 802.11p system point of…
The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution and the development of smart communities have resulted in increased demand for bandwidth due to the rise in network traffic. Instead of investing in expensive communications infrastructure, some researchers have proposed leveraging Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) as the data communications infrastructure. However VANETs are not cheap since they require the deployment of expensive Road Side Units (RSU)s across smart communities. In this research, we propose an infrastructure-less system that opportunistically utilizes vehicles to serve as Local Communi…
This paper studies the fundamental communication properties of urban vehicle networks by exploiting the self-similarity and hierarchical organization of modern cities. We use an innovative model called "hyperfractal" that captures the self-similarities of both the traffic and vehicle locations but avoids the extremes of regularity and randomness. We use analytical tools to derive theoretical upper and lower bounds for the information propagation speed in an urban delay tolerant network (i.e., a network that is disconnected at all time, and thus uses a store-carry-and-forward routing model). We…
Realistic propagation modeling requires a detailed understanding and characterization of the radio channel properties. This paper is based on channel sounder measurements with 1 GHz bandwidth at a carrier frequency of 5.7 GHz and particular tracking methods. We present statistical models for the number of, birth rate, lifetime, excess delay and relative Doppler frequency of individual multipath components (MPCs). Our findings are concluded from 72 measurement runs in eight relevant vehicular communication scenarios and reveal wide insights into the dynamic propagation process in vehicular comm…
In vehicular communications, in-vehicle devices' mobile and multihoming characteristics bring new requirements for devicevsecurity authentication. On the one hand, the existing network layer authentication methods rely on the PKI system; on the other hand, key negotiation needs interaction. These two points determine that the traditional security authentication method requires bandwidth consumption and additional delay. It is unsuitable for heterogeneous wireless scenarios with a high packet loss rate and limited bandwidth resources. In addition, the establishment of a security association sta…
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；University of Windsor（温莎大学）
In this paper, we study a network slicing problem for edge-cloud orchestrated vehicular networks, in which the edge and cloud servers are orchestrated to process computation tasks for reducing network slicing cost while satisfying the quality of service requirements. We propose a two-stage network slicing framework, which consists of 1) network planning stage in a large timescale to perform slice deployment, edge resource provisioning, and cloud resource provisioning, and 2) network operation stage in a small timescale to perform resource allocation and task dispatching. Particularly, we formu…
The highway vehicular ad hoc networks, where vehicles are wirelessly inter-connected, rely on the multi-hop transmissions for end-to-end communications. This, however, is severely challenged by the unreliable wireless connections, signal attenuation and channel contentions in the dynamic vehicular environment. To overcome the network dynamics, selecting appropriate relays for end-to-end connections is important. Different from the previous efforts (\emph{e.g.}, clustering and cooperative downloading), this paper explores the existence of stable vehicles and propose building a stable multi-hop …
Advances in connected vehicles based on Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) in recent years have gained significant attention in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in terms of disseminating messages in an efficient manner. VANET uses Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) for disseminating messages between vehicles and between infrastructures. Though DSRC based communications are viable, it is still challenging to disseminate messages in a timely manner when vehicles are not in the transmission range of each other. Furthermore, DSRC communication channels are heavily congested when the veh…
Routing of messages in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is challenging due to obstacle shadowing regions with high vehicle densities, which leads to frequent disconnection problems and blocks radio wave propagation between vehicles. Previous researchers used multi-hop, vehicular cloud or roadside infrastructures to solve the routing issue among the vehicles, but they suffer from significant packet delays and frequent packet losses arising from obstacle shadowing. We proposed a vehicular cloud based hybrid technique called Hybrid-Vehcloud to disseminate messages in obstacle shadowing regions,…
In recent years, the number of IoT devices has been growing fast which leads to a challenging task for managing, storing, analyzing, and making decisions about raw data from different IoT devices, especially for delay-sensitive applications. In a vehicular network (VANET) environment, the dynamic nature of vehicles makes the current open research issues even more challenging due to the frequent topology changes that can lead to disconnections between vehicles. To this end, a number of research works have been proposed in the context of cloud and fog computing over the 5G infrastructure. On the…
In vehicular ad hoc networks, the dynamic change in transmission power is very effective to increase the throughput of the wireless vehicular network and decrease the delay of the message communication between vehicular nodes on the highway. Transmission range is directly proportional to the transmission power the moving node. If the transmission power will be high, the interference increases that can cause higher delay in message reception at receiver end, hence the performance of the network decreased. In this paper, it is analyzed that how transmission power can be controlled by considering…
The emergence of technologies such as 5G and mobile edge computing has enabled provisioning of different types of services with different resource and service requirements to the vehicles in a vehicular network.The growing complexity of traffic mobility patterns and dynamics in the requests for different types of services has made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic (RL-Dynamic) service placement framework to …
