Enabling Safety-Critical and Computation-Intensive IoV Applications via Vehicular Fog Computing

With recent development of wireless communication, sensing and computing technologies, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has attracted great attention in both academia and industry. Services with low communication latency and high reliability are necessary to enable safety-critical applications in IoV. Nevertheless, it is challenging to satisfy the service requirement due to unique characteristics of IoV, including limited wireless communication bandwidth, high vehicle mobility, massive data transmission, and overwhelming computation overhead. In view of this, we propose a novel vehicular fog computing (VFC) architecture to explore the synergistic effect of the cloud, the static fog and the mobile fog by defining corresponding service modes. On this basis, we further formulate a task offloading model, which quantitatively analyzes the characteristics of the three service modes and enables task offloading based on particular service requirements. Finally, we implement a traffic abnormity detection and warning system based on the proposed architecture as a case study. The hardware-in-the-loop performance evaluation not only demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, but also enlightens future research directions on developing adaptive task offloading for dynamic IoV applications.