RCS-VC: renting out and consuming services in vehicular clouds based on LTE-A

Vehicular Clouds (VCs) is a new concept in which vehicles can be both cloud users and service providers. Vehicle users need to discover provider vehicles, know their services, and request services from them. For this, a cloud directory must be used to store information about provider vehicles and hence to form a dynamic index of such providers. In this paper, we design a new protocol that enables provider vehicles in a VANet to rent out their services and resources to other vehicles. We use LTEA infrastructure to exploit it as cloud directories with which provider vehicles register and from which consumer vehicles discover all offered services. We evaluate the performance of our scheme throughout an extensive set of simulation experiments, using both OMNet++ simulator and SimuLTE tool that is recently developed to enable performance evaluation of LTE-A under OMNet++.