Connectivity-aware service provision in vehicular cloud

In the last twenty years, vehicles have become equipped with various sensors and resources, making them capable to communicate, to share resources and to behave cooperatively. This gave rise to the concept of vehicular cloud (VC). Vehicular cloud can be described from the standpoint of applications and services offered by vehicles that belong to a Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET). Because of the limitation of computation, storage and bandwidth resources for complex in-vehicle multimedia, entertainment applications, it is important to request services from service provider vehicles in the network, forming a cloud. However, the main challenge of vehicular networks is how to maintain the connectivity between the vehicles during service provision process. It is important to note that, to fully provide a service without interruption, it is necessary to ensure that the connectivity duration between the requestor and the service provider vehicles is sufficient for a complete end-to-end transmission. In this paper, a connectivity-aware service provision mechanism is proposed for VANET, where the service provider vehicle is selected based on several parameters such as the availability of the requested service and the mobility of the vehicles.