Towards an Analysis of the Architecture, Security, and Privacy Issues in Vehicular Fog Computing

The vehicular fog is a relatively new computing paradigm where fog computing works with the vehicular network. It provides computation, storage, and location-aware services with low latency to the vehicles in close proximity. A vehicular fog network can be formed on-the-fly by adding underutilized or unused resources of nearby parked or moving vehicles. Interested vehicles can outsource their resources or data by being added to the vehicular fog network while maintaining proper security and privacy. Client vehicles can use these resources or services for performing computation-intensive tasks, storing data, or getting crowd-source reports through the proper secure and privacy-preserving communication channel. As most vehicular network applications are latency and location sensitive, fog is more suitable than the cloud because of the capability of performing calculations with low latency, location awareness, and the support of mobility. Architecture, security, and privacy models of vehicular fog are not well defined and widely accepted yet as it is in its early stage. In this paper, we have analyzed existing studies on vehicular fog to determine the requirements and issues related to the architecture, security, and privacy of vehicular fog computing. We have also identified and highlighted the open research problems in this promising area.