Multimedia Services in Cloud-Based Vehicular Networks

Research into the requirements for mobile services has seen a growing interest in the fields of cloud technology and vehicular applications. Integrating cloud computing and storage with vehicles is a way to increase accessibility to multimedia services, and inspire myriad potential applications and research topics. This paper presents an overview of the characteristics of cloud computing, and introduces the basic concepts of vehicular networks. An architecture for multimedia cloud computing is proposed to suit subscription service mechanisms. The tendency to equip vehicles with advanced and embedded devices such as diverse sensors increases the capabilities of vehicles to provide computation and collection of multimedia content in the form of the vehicular network. Then, the taxonomy of cloud-based vehicular networks is addressed from the standpoint of the service relationship between the cloud computing and vehicular networks. In this paper, we identify the main considerations and challenges for cloud based vehicular networks regarding multimedia services, and propose potential research directions to make multimedia services achievable. More specifically, we quantitatively evaluate the performance metrics of these researches. For example, in the proposed broadcast storm mitigation scheme for vehicular networks, the packet delivery ratio and the normalized throughput can both achieve about 90%, making the proposed scheme a useful candidate for multimedia data exchange. Moreover, in the video uplinking scenarios, the proposed scheme is favorably compared with two well-known schedulers, M-LWDF and EXP, with the performance much closer to the optimum.