Comparing Fog Solutions for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Intelligent vehicular wireless networks and services have witnessed great advancements in both technology and management capabilities. Vehicular networks commenced as simple ad hoc networks with node-to-node communication capabilities. Today, vehicular networks not only provide sophisticated vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but also make use of state-of-the-art cloud and fog computing frameworks to deliver composite vehicular services and provide energy-efficient service delivery mechanisms. Fog and mobile edge computing spread communication, storage, and computing resources all over the wireless access network, thus providing greater resource and service access to resource- and energy-limited wireless and mobile devices such as smart vehicles. This article envisions a smart city solution that considers collaboration among vehicular and mobile nodes to provide a more energy-efficient service delivery mechanism. Different solutions are examined that consider cloud and fog entities used to deliver continuous and stable simple and complex services for both current and future vehicular node service requests. One of the considered energy-efficient solutions forms clusters of both vehicular and mobile nodes according to their service, energy, and movement characteristics. We show that this solution can further be enhanced using node collaboration to negotiate for optimal services according to users' quality of experience parameter configurations. We compare four different solutions using simulation tests to identify the ones with adequate service delivery guarantees and energy consumption.