Fog Computing Empowered Data Dissemination in Software Defined Heterogeneous VANETs

This paper makes the first effort on proposing a fog computing empowered architecture together with a dedicated scheduling algorithm for data dissemination in software defined heterogeneous vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Specifically, the architecture supports both the logically centralized control via the cloud node in the core network and the distributed data dissemination via the fog nodes at the network edge. A problem called fog assisted cooperative service (FACS) is formulated, which takes network coding and vehicular caching into consideration, and aims at minimizing the overall service delay via the cooperation of vehicle-to-cloud (V2C), vehicle-to-fog (V2F) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Further, we derive an equivalence problem of FACS and prove that FACS is NP-hard. On this basis, we propose a Clique Searching based Scheduling (CSS) algorithm at the SDN controller, which considers the heterogeneous communication interfaces and vehicle mobility in scheduling, and enables the collaborative data encoding and transmission among the cloud, fog nodes and vehicles. The complexity analysis demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed algorithm. Finally, we build the simulation model and give a comprehensive performance evaluation based on real vehicular trajectories extracted from different time and space. The simulation results conclusively demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution.