On the feasibility of vehicular micro clouds

This paper investigates the feasibility and the potential of vehicle cloudification, an emerging paradigm to utilize ever-growing computational resources of intelligent vehicles to form small-scale virtual cloud computing facilities. Multiple vehicles in communication range collaboratively form so-called vehicular micro clouds, which serve as virtual edge servers that offer data processing, data storage, communications, and sensing services not only to vehicles but also to any other types of authorized users. Although the conceptual design has been established already in the literature, the feasibility of vehicular micro clouds under practical road conditions has still to be thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we tackle this research question by analyzing vehicle probe datasets, generated by real road traffic models of the city of Luxembourg and a major intercity highway in Japan. The results indicate that connected vehicular micro clouds can be formed at many locations throughout the road networks, especially under heavy road traffic during rush hours.