Leverage parking cars in a two-tier data center

A large number of data centers have been deployed and available for public renting with the rapid development of cloud computing recently. Meanwhile, the proliferation of automotive electronics has made rich resources in various forms of computation and communication. It is challenging but of great significance to make use of these resources in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a two-tier data center architecture that leverages the excessive storage resources in parking lots. Such resources form an auxiliary vehicular data center (VDC) such that the pressure on the conventional data center can be mitigated and the total communication cost be reduced. After modeling the dynamics of available resources in a parking lot with a finite capacity, we propose three VDC management policies (i.e., non-replication, simple replication and network coding based replication) and derive their total communication cost in closed form. The high efficiency of the two-tier data center architecture and the accuracy of our analysis are validated via extensive simulations.