Integrating Fog Computing with VANETs: A Consumer Perspective

Abstract

Emerging vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) applications are requiring a lot more communication and computation capabilities. Today's cloud infrastructures are not specifically designed to cope with the requirements presented by promising VANET applications. In this regard, fog computing focuses on moving computational resources toward the edge of the network to cater for these increasing processing and storage requirements. Thus, vehicular fog extends the fog computing paradigm to traditional vehicular networks that consist of several IoT devices. This overcomes the shortcomings of vehicular clouds by enabling ubiquitous vehicles, efficient communication, location-aware service provision, improved response time, and lower latency. This article presents fog-computing-based VANET architecture along with an infotainment application scenario. In the experiments, the cache size of fog nodes has been used as a parameter to evaluate its impact on different performance metrics in the fog-enabled VANET environment. We conclude the article by presenting various benefits of a fog-enabled VANET while investigating future challenges and their potential solutions.