RSU-driven Cloud Construction and Management Mechanism in VANETs

Recently, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) introduce a Vehicular Cloud (VC) model for collaborating to share and use resources of vehicles to create value-added services. To construct a VC, a vehicle should search vehicles that intend to provide their own resource. The single-hop search cannot search enough provider vehicles due to a small coverage and out-of-sight-zone of communications. On the other hand, the multi-hop search causes very high traffics for large coverage searching and frequent connection breakages. Recently, many Roadside Units (RSUs) have been deployed on roads to collect the information of vehicles in their own coverages and connect them to Internet. Thus, we propose a RSU-aided vehicular resource search and cloud construction mechanism in VANETS. In the proposed mechanism, a RSU selects provider vehicles enabled to provide resources needed for constructing a VC based on the information of location and mobility of vehicles. In the proposed mechanism, the criteria for determining provider vehicles are the connection duration between each candidate vehicle and the requester vehicle, the resource size of each candidate vehicle, and its connection starting time to the requester vehicle. Simulation results verify that the proposed mechanism achieves better performance than the existing mechanism.