Reinforcement Learning-based Virtual Sensors Provision in Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been recognized as a powerful application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), providing intelligence for interconnection between devices, interaction with the environment, and thus, greater efficiency in sensor data exploitation. Therefore, leveraging the huge capability of sensors embedded in vehicles to offer a Sensing As A Service (Se-aaS) represents a great solution to exploit under-used sensor resources and continue providing sensors despite their positions and mobility patterns. Nevertheless, the high network mobility and the fast topology changes in IoV impact the vehicle availability and complicate the service provision. To this aim, we propose a vehicle sensor virtualization in a Cloud IoV architecture that encompasses functional blocks of mobile sensor suppliers, Sensor Cloud Service Provider (SCSP), and service consumers. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning-based solution for vehicle sensor selection to predict and dynamically select the physical sensors composing the vehicle virtual sensor. The conducted simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.