Renting Out Cloud Services in Mobile Vehicular Cloud

Vehicular cloud is a promising paradigm in which mobile vehicles can be both cloud users and service providers. It enables vehicles that have sufficient resources to act as mobile cloud servers by offering a wide range of services to user's vehicles. However, user vehicles need to discover provider vehicles along with their services, and request targeted services from them, especially with the high mobility of vehicles. Moreover, provider vehicles and their services are characterized by specific quality criteria and consumer vehicles need to select the most suitable services. In this paper, we design a new protocol that enables vehicles to discover and consume services of mobile cloud servers that are moving nearby. The protocol harnesses public buses, which provide a stability in terms of time (regular timetables) and space (fixed lines in an urban area), making them act as cloud directories, where provider vehicles can register their services. Public buses spread service registration information to the buses within the same bus line, and to buses of connected lines, as well. A consumer vehicle can discover the available services, along with their constraints, by querying the buses in their vicinity. To ensure service consumption, the buses provide also a routing protocol allowing communication between the provider and the consumer. Furthermore, we extend our protocol to enable, on the one hand, vehicle providers to select the most appropriate public bus for an efficient service registration, and users to select, on the other hand, the most satisfactory service, which satisfies both provider constraints and user preferences. Simulation results showed the efficiency of our protocol in terms of service discovery and service consuming delays, as well as its ability to select both the most suitable cloud directory and service provider for both providers and consumers, respectively.