Vehicle as a resource for continuous service availability in smart cities

Abstract

The Smart City vision is to improve quality of life and efficiency of urban operations and services while meeting economic, social, and environmental needs of its dwellers. Realizing this vision requires cities to make significant investments in all kinds of smart objects. Recently, the concept of smart vehicle has also emerged as a viable solution for various pressing problems such as traffic management, drivers' comfort, road safety and on-demand provisioning services. With the availability of onboard vehicular services, these vehicles will be a constructive key enabler of smart cities. Smart vehicles are capable of sharing and storing digital content, sensing and monitoring its surroundings, and mobilizing on-demand services. However, the provisioning of these services is challenging due to different ownerships, costs, demand levels, and rewards. In this paper, we present the concept of Smart Vehicle as a Service (SVaaS) to provide continuous vehicular services in smart cities. The solution relies on a location prediction mechanism to determine a vehicle's future location. Once a vehicle's predicted location is determined, a Quality of Experience (QoE) based service selection mechanism is used to select services that are needed before the vehicle's arrival. We provide simulation results to show that our approach can adequately establish vehicular services in a timely and efficient manner. It also shows that the number of utilized services have been doubled when prediction and service discovery is applied.