Using Vehicles as Fog Infrastructures for Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS): Fog Computing for Vehicular Networks

The advent of intelligent vehicular applications and IoT technologies gives rise to data-intensive challenges across different architectural layers of an intelligent transportation system (ITS). Without powerful communication and computational infrastructure, various vehicular applications and services will still stay in the concept phase and cannot be put into practice in daily life. The current cloud computing and cellular set-ups are far from perfect because they are highly dependent on, and bear the cost of additional infrastructure deployment. Thus, the geo-distributed ITS components require a paradigm shift from centralized cloud-scale processing to edge centered fog computing (FC) paradigms. FC outspreads the computing facilities into the edge of a network, offering location-awareness, latency-sensitive monitoring, and intelligent control. In this article, the authors identify the mission-critical computing needs of the next generation ITS applications and highlight the scopes of FC based solutions towards addressing them. Then, the authors discuss the scenarios where the underutilized communication and computational resources available in connected vehicles can be brought in to perform the role of FC infrastructures. Then the authors present a service-oriented software architecture (SOA) for FC-based Big Data Analytics in ITS applications. The authors also provide a detailed analysis of the potential challenges of using connected vehicles as FC infrastructures along with future research directions.