Enhancing Resource Availability in Vehicular Fog Computing Through Smart Inter-Domain Handover

In recent years, computer network architectures are experiencing a significant shift motivated by a myriad of edge devices generating a tremendous volume of data, service providers deploying real-time and huge bandwidth-consuming network applications, and mobile end-users demanding stringent quality of service and reduced service disruption. The fog computing architecture aims at addressing several related issues by employing computing resources at the edge of the network. However, frequent and even unexpected handover among distinct fog domains is yet a research challenge because it hinders the continuous availability of shared edge resources. In this work, we employ reinforcement learning (RL) to learn from experience how to maximize the availability of resources at fog domains by minimizing the handover frequency in vehicular scenarios through smart resource placement. We evaluated our RL-based model in simulations mimicking real-world scenarios where each moving vehicle may connect to different fog domains throughout its route. The results show that the proposed model yields an improvement in the availability of resources in comparison to a greedy strategy under all simulated scenarios.