Vehicular Cloud Networking: Architecture and Design Principles

Over the past several decades, VANET has been a core networking technology to provide safety and comfort to drivers in vehicular environments. Emerging applications and services, however, require major changes to its underlying computing and networking models, which demand new network planning for VANET. This article especially examines how VANET evolves with two emerging paradigms: vehicular cloud computing and information-centric networking. VCC brings the mobile cloud model to vehicular networks and thus changes the way of network service provisioning, whereas ICN changes the notion of data routing and dissemination. We envision a new vehicular networking system, vehicular cloud networking, on top of them. This article scrutinizes its architecture and operations, and discusses its design principles.