A Proactive Reliable Mechanism-Based Vehicular Fog Computing Network

Abstract

As vehicles are becoming more and more intelligent, mobile data traffic in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has been increasing dramatically. This makes the communication capacity of VANET systems and the computing resources of vehicles insufficient. In the meantime, location-aware large-scale distributed services with very low latency and high reliability are demanded by most of the novel functions, such as accident alarming, and congestion warning, in the intelligent transportation system. To meet these claimed characteristics of VANET, we first present a novel architecture that integrates vehicular fog computing and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies. Lower latency and higher quality services can be supplied to vehicles by nearby fog servers, which are virtualized from vehicles that locate close enough and communicate using the V2V link. However, like all collaborative systems, computing reliability is vital to collaborative VANET. In this article, we design a novel energy-efficient proactive replication mechanism. Follower vehicles calculate with a lazy rate act as backups of host vehicles to ensure the reliability of the system. Considering the time sensitivity of computing requirements in VANET, the upper bound on the total number of failures is proposed through theoretical analysis. Then, the lower bound on the lazy calculating rate of followers is derived by balancing the tradeoffs between delay and energy. A fast algorithm for searching this lower bound based on the discrete Newton method is also proposed. Results of numerical experiments show that our new mechanism is effective in energy saving and reliability enhancing.