Technology assessment for mission-critical services on automotive virtual edge communicator (AVEC)

Mission critical services are beginning to migrate to broadband from the trusted-but-limited existing systems. They need assured availability and confidentiality for communication in areas affected by a disaster, flash crowding or any catastrophic network failure. This paper describes a vision for an automotive virtual edge Communication scheme that helps healing stricken networks, utilizing any available resources for hosting network functions on vehicles. Emergency and essential service organizations who rush to the area would ‘bring their own network’, i.e. computing capacity and connectivity tools, aboard their service vehicles. These vehicles form a dynamic community that shares resources, information and services, using the combined processing capacity via virtualized core functions. To realize such a scheme, innovative features are required, such as cooperative hosting, opportunistic vehicular resource virtualization, context-based edge SDN traffic prioritization, and ad-hoc vehicular community management, including multi-entity authentication.