A Survey on Architecture, Applications, and Challenges in Vehicular Fog Computing

Connected vehicles are making intelligent transportation system (ITS) a reality, and because of the increase in the onboard computing capability of vehicles, demand for new applications is growing. Vehicular fog computing (VFC) represents a collaborative multitude of onboard vehicular resources to augment the capacity of fog computing. It is an important concept to address numerous issues related to fog computing like, high installation cost, sub-optimal utilization of resources, and developing many novel applications, etc. Vehicular fog computing research has witnessed different architectural, applications, and implementation challenges, studied by various authors. In this paper, we study the architecture of vehicular fog computing and present various unique characteristics of vehicular fog computing along with providing a detailed comparison with conventional fog computing. We analyze VFC implications in ITS with respect to architecture, applications, and challenges. We discuss and analyze the existing applications and research challenges in them. We also explain a novel application use-case of vehicular fog computing, bridging cellular network coverage holes using vehicular fog computing. Finally, we present new and promising applications and open research challenges therein.