An Incentive Mechanism for Computing Resource Allocation in Vehicular Fog Computing Environment

Abstract

Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) has recently become a promising research field. Fog Computing (FC) paradigm is used to enhance the quality of services of cloud computing by extending it to the edge of the network using collaborative devices nearby the end users. The VFC deploys computing resources of vehicles situated at the edge of the network to serve local on-demand mobile applications. Most of the previous research works assume that vehicles can serve as fog nodes unconditionally, which is not always true. In this paper, we investigate the problem of resource allocation in a VFC environment where resource-sharing is needed. Data service operators (DSO) and the fog nodes (FN) i.e. Vehicles participate in computation offloading and serve User Equipements (UE) demands. Hence, a joint optimization approach is designed to model the interactions among DSOs, FNs and UEs. We present a new incentive mechanism to stimulate vehicles to serve as fog nodes and share their computing resources based on UE demands. The simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of a VFC in terms of resource-sharing by dedicating the computational resources of vehicles to the UEs demands.