Design and Evaluation of Schemes for Replacing Multiple Member Vehicles in Vehicular Clouds

Abstract

Vehicular clouds are considered an attractive approach to provide various services such as safety and entertainment applications by sharing resources between vehicles. Due to the free mobility of vehicles, vehicular clouds need to reconstruct by replacing leaving member vehicles with new member vehicles. When multiple member vehicles leave a vehicular cloud at different times, the design of an efficient member vehicle replacement scheme is a very challenging issue on determining the replacement timing. However, the research on the replacement of multiple member vehicles has little interest and is still in its infancy. Therefore, we propose three schemes to replace multiple member vehicles in vehicular clouds at three different replacement timings: MIN, MAX, and AVG. The MIN scheme replaces all of leaving member vehicles at the leaving time of the first leaving member vehicle, while the MAX scheme replaces all of leaving member vehicles at the leaving time of the last leaving member. The AVG scheme replaces all leaving member vehicles at the average time of their leaving times as a compromise between the Min and Max schemes. First, we determine the first leaving time, the last leaving time, and the average leaving time for each scheme by calculating the distance between a cloud requester vehicle and its member vehicles. Next, we choose replacement member vehicles to minimize the wasted resource at the replacement timing in each scheme. Last, we provide the process for releasing the resource of the leaving member vehicles and allocating the resource of the replacement member vehicles in each scheme. Through simulation results conducted in various environments, we compare and evaluate the performance of our three schemes in terms of the success ratio of the cloud maintenance and the amount of the wasted resources.