Reconsidering the cloud approach towards VANET communication

There has been a sudden up-rise in the research activities of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), however it is expected that vehicles of the future will not be able to fully utilize their computational storage and communication abilities. Therefore the next step that is seen for VANET is communication of vehicles using the computing power of cloud. In simpler words, combining cloud computing and VANET. It is an emerging technology which allows the formation of self-organizing network providing an efficient communication between participating vehicles. But in various researches there has been no mention of a concrete architecture which combines VANET and cloud. In this paper is presented an architecture for VANET which uses cloud computing. This is one of its kind effort towards presenting an architecture for cloud based VANET. Also, the cloud based VANET is being divided into three different schemas, namely Cloud of Vehicles (CoV), Cloud used by Vehicles (CuV) and Hybrid Cloud of Vehicles (HCoV). In this paper we also present the various issues and challenges in cloud based VANET pertaining to privacy, security and research respectively.