Virtualization in VANETs to support the vehicular cloud — Experiments with the network as a service model

The scenarios envisaged for the paradigm of vehicular cloud computing (VCC) have been limited by the challenges derived from the mobility of the vehicles, to the point that most of the proposals in the literature merely deal with vehicles in parking lots, stuck in traffic jams or moving as a flock for a long time. We present an approach to overcome those limitations by engaging the vehicles in collaboration to emulate an infrastructure of stationary virtual nodes, which can be made responsible for computing, sensing, storage and communication tasks. We present the architecture and the main procedures of the proposal, along with the results of simulations of the VCC service model known as Network as a Service (NaaS).