Towards an Efficient Vehicular Clouds using Mobile Brokers

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANET) is the backbone technology behind Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) which offers a plethora of safety and comfort applications. With their powerful computation and storage capacities, vehicles themselves can play the role of services producers, thus, realizing the concept of Vehicular Clouds (VC) within the network. However, to make their services discoverable, they publish their services in a shared repository, generally within the fixed Roadside Units (RSU). Unfortunately, if the requesting vehicle is not within the range of RSU, it is hard to request or publish a service. In this paper, we propose an efficient vehicular cloud architecture that takes advantage of the public buses as a mobile cloud repository, called also `brokers'. Their known path and coverage of all the city areas makes them the most suitable place to store the existing services. In addition, we implemented our proposal over a trust-based routing protocol which selects the most connected and trusted path to deliver both requests and provide services. Simulation results depict that our proposal can reach high success ratios (> 90%) using a reduced number of mobile brokers in the network.