A Cloud Computing Perspective for Distributed Routing in Vehicular Environments

[Abstract] Vehicular networks have been envisioned to provide us with numerous interesting services such as dissemination of real⁃time safety warnings and commercial advertisements via car⁃to⁃car communication. However, efficient routing is a research challenge due to the highly dynamic nature of these networks. Nevertheless, the availability of connections imposes additional constraint. Our earlier works in the area of efficient dissemination integrates the advantages of middleware operations with multicast routing to design a framework for distributed routing in vehicular networks. Cloud computing makes use of pools of physical computing resources to meet the requirements of such highly dynamic networks. The proposed solution in this paper applies the principles of cloud computing to our existing framework. The routing protocol works at the network layer for the formation of clouds in specific geographic regions. Simulation results present the efficiency of the model in terms of service discovery, download time and the queuing delay at the controller nodes.

[Keywords] cloud computing; distributed routing; vehicular networks