Smart Cities on Wheels: A Newly Emerging Vehicular Cognitive Capability Harvesting Network for Data Transportation

With the emergence of IoT and smart cities, wireless data traffic is exponentially increasing, motivating telecom operators to search for new solutions. In this article, we propose a solution based on the premise that vehicles are equipped with CR routers, specially designed powerful devices with agile communication interfaces, rich computing resources, and abundant storage space. To fully exploit the capabilities of such vehicles, we propose a V-CCHN architecture where CR router enabled vehicles are employed to connect end devices to the V-CCHN and transport data to intended locations via storage of on-board CR routers and spectrum resources harvested from various systems. Considering the abundant storage of on-board CR routers and a wide range of under-utilized spectrum, the V-CCHN is expected to effectively transport substantial amounts of data between end devices and data networks, which offers an effective solution to handling the explosive wireless data traffic and well complements existing telecommunications networks.