Poster: Using clusters of parked cars as virtual vehicular network infrastructure

In future smart cities, cars will be equipped with multiple communication technologies. The Car4ICT architecture aims to exploit such cars for providing services to users. Cars take the role of service hubs and support users in discovering services and utilizing them. So far, Car4ICT has been investigated in urban and rural scenarios, but parked cars have not been considered part of it. As such parked cars are ubiquitous in cities, they help improve the architecture even further by reducing the need to rely on Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) and adding more services. In this paper, we outline our integration of parked cars into the Car4ICT architecture. By combining them into clusters, we are able to add additional network nodes, thus improving the stability of the network topology. Furthermore, members of these clusters are then connected to the Car4ICT network and are able to provide/consume extra services. While there exist solutions for clustering, there are several research questions when integrating such virtual vehicular network infrastructure. We describe our approach and discuss some of the interesting research questions and the problems that have to be solved.