Communication as a service for cloud VANETs

The advance in vehicular and wireless communications has contributed to the release of Vehicular Clouds which makes it possible to release various multimedia and storage services. However, providing a communication service which allows to cope with the high mobility of vehicles, and the limited availability of wireless resources, while guaranteeing a high quality of service (QoS), is a challenging issue. This paper proposes a cloud Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS) to: a) enable a continuous communication to vehicle located beyond the area uncovered by Roadside units; b) guarantee the Quality of Service QoS (QoS) in terms of delay, throughput and packet loss rate; and c) cope with resources limitation in vehicular networks. To implement these solutions, a Vehicular Cloud architecture (V-Cloud) which is composed by three layers, is proposed. The first layer, entitled Vehicular Cloudlet, consists of a set of vehicles connected to the network and organized into groups, creating a tree topology. The second layer, named Roadside Cloudlet, is a local cloud established among a set of neighboring RSUs. Finally, the third layer is the central cloud which is a cloud established among a group of servers in the Internet.