Keeping Data Alive: Communication Across Vehicular Micro Clouds

Vehicular micro clouds are considered a prime building block for next generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) also supporting a variety of Information and Communication Systems (ICT) applications in smart cities. Such micro clouds are established by multiple cars equipped with communication, storage, and computational resources. We recently presented the concept of hierarchical vehicular cloud computing, which is meant to extend on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Based on clustering algorithms, we can set up and maintain such micro clouds and eventually make use of the distributed resources. Looking at the high mobility of cars, it is very difficult to reliably maintain data collected by cars at a given location in space that is geographically relevant, e.g., at intersections. In this paper, we propose a new protocol which encourages coordination between neighboring micro clouds to help keeping local data current, i.e., cars moving out of the micro cloud may take data to neighboring clouds, hand data over to cars moving towards the original micro cloud, and, thus, returning the data to its original geographical location. We evaluate the performance of the protocol with different vehicle densities in a Manhattan Grid scenario and our results show the benefits of our proposed inter micro cloud coordination protocol.