Fog and Edge Computing for Automotive Applications

With the rapid increase in the economy, the number of vehicles has grown extensively in the past few years. This leads to a sequence of traffic-related issues, starting with the driver’s and passenger’s safety, traffic congestion, and transportation delay. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can provide a better solution for the above problems, by smartly connecting the vehicles. Thus, every vehicle senses and shares traffic-related information with other vehicles through the Internet. IoV provides smart and intelligent applications that consume a significant amount of computing power and network resources. However, the limited computational capacity of onboard ECUs makes it difficult to perform these highly demanding applications. Moreover, the data sensed from the vehicles are processed on the cloud data centers, which reside at multi-hop distance from the IoV devices. Thus, a longer period is required to pass the data between the IoV devices and applications resulting in degradation of application service delivery time and network congestion. This possesses a severe threat to the driver’s safety. To tackle these challenges, fog and edge computing can be used as an innovative technology that acts as an extension of the cloud at edge network. Edge computing provides processing of data at the Internet gateways, whereas fog computing includes gateways and additional computing components to reduce the burdens of resources and services from the user. In this paper, a detailed survey on fog and edge computing for smart and secure vehicular communications has been discussed. It also elaborates on the application management and mobility of fog computing nodes in vehicular environments.