Vehicular Clouds

Abstract

Vehicular clouds is an active area of research that has emerged at the nexus of conventional cloud computing and vehicular networks. The defining differences between conventional and vehicular clouds include the heterogeneity and volatility of compute resources and the bandwidth-challenged network fabric. A variety of new architectures and services for vehicular clouds have been proposed, mostly as incremental extensions of the VANET platform. As vehicular cloud research continues and expands, a careful eye should be kept on the restrictions that come with the mobility, limited network, and heterogeneity of resources. The first main contribution of this chapter is to survey recent work of VCs with an eye on the realistic and unrealistic. Our second main goal is to realign the VC community with a realistic vision for the future by spelling out a number of challenges faced by the VC research community.