Revealing and Modeling Vehicular Micro Clouds Characteristics in a Large-Scale Mobility Trace

In recent years, we have witnessed the viability of applying cloud computing concepts to the domain of vehicular networks. A basic component of this infrastructure derived from the merge of cloud computing and vehicular networks is a Vehicular Micro Cloud (VMC), also known as vehicular cloudlets. A VMC is a cluster of connected vehicles that share computational resources. Despite being the focus of many studies in recent years, we still do not have a clear understanding of the characteristics of VMCs in large-scale urban scenarios. In this paper, we investigate some fundamental characteristics of stationary and mobile VMCs obtained from a realistic vehicular mobility trace. We characterize the dwell time and the inter-arrival time in stationary VMCs. Also, using statistical modeling, we identify theoretical distributions that best fit these metrics. For mobile VMCs, we reveal how they occur throughout the city along the day, discussing evolution and lifetime aspects.