Trusted Third Party for Service Management in Vehicular Clouds

As vehicles get smarter, with supplementary on-board gear providing advanced applications and provisioning services related to traffic management, the requirement for simple and effective access to information has grown extensively. The new applications manage more complex operations and, unlike other mobile devices, mobile vehicle devices provide location based services, real-time functionality, provisioning services and storage, all without the shortcomings of traditional mobile devices. Vehicular cloud computing can perform a broad set of on-demand services and applications, which make this method highly applicable to urban settings. Provisioning services often encounter unexpected interruptions that increase provisioning latency and service usage duration, ultimately leading to higher charges for the driver. This paper advances our previously proposed distributed model to handle service management in vehicular clouds, by using the concept of Vehicular Trusted Third Party (VTTP) with different type of provisioning services. This model has the capability to switch between TTPs, which allows drivers to exploit the benefits of different existing services, and connect to the TTP that best meets their specific requirements. Two new service latency modes are proposed and evaluated: Service Latency Sensitive Mode (SLSM) and Neutral mode. The proposed model has been implemented and evaluated using simulations of real-time light and heavy duty services, and various simulation scenarios show that using a VTTP can significantly help drivers reduce their service latency (similar to 30%) and costs (similar to 26%).