Vehicular Fog Computing: Enabling Real-Time Traffic Management for Smart Cities

TLDR

Fog computing extends cloud computing to edge networks, offering location awareness and low latency, yet rising connectivity demands challenge real‑time traffic management; vehicular fog computing (VFC) integrates fog with vehicular networks to enable real‑time, location‑aware responses. The article constructs a three‑layer VFC model to enable distributed traffic management and minimize response time for citywide events. The authors formulate a VFC‑enabled offloading scheme as an optimization problem that leverages moving and parked vehicles as fog nodes. Real‑world taxi‑trajectory analysis validates the model, and the study highlights research challenges and open issues for VFC‑enabled traffic management.

Abstract

Fog computing extends the facility of cloud computing from the center to edge networks. Although fog computing has the advantages of location awareness and low latency, the rising requirements of ubiquitous connectivity and ultra-low latency challenge real-time traffic management for smart cities. As an integration of fog computing and vehicular networks, vehicular fog computing (VFC) is promising to achieve real-time and location-aware network responses. Since the concept and use case of VFC are in the initial phase, this article first constructs a three-layer VFC model to enable distributed traffic management in order to minimize the response time of citywide events collected and reported by vehicles. Furthermore, the VFC-enabled offloading scheme is formulated as an optimization problem by leveraging moving and parked vehicles as fog nodes. A real-world taxi-trajectory-based performance analysis validates our model. Finally, some research challenges and open issues toward VFC-enabled traffic management are summarized and highlighted.