Overlapping Vehicular Micro Clouds

Abstract

A Vehicular Micro Cloud (VMC) is a group of connected vehicles where vehicles collaborate on tasks through vehicular networks. VMCs may overlap with other vehicular micro clouds in certain regions (e.g., intersections), known as overlapping zones. In overlapping zones, micro cloud members may have to switch between multiple VMCs back and forth, which degrades the functionality of the VMC. In this paper, we address this problem and propose to regroup micro cloud members when VMCs overlap. VMCs share their information with a remote server. The remote server controls and swaps members among VMCs in overlapping zones. We test the feasibility of the proposed approach through a simulation study. Extensive simulations in different settings demonstrate that controlled membership swaps can reduce the member switches among VMCs in overlapping zones by about 85%.