6. Fog-Enabled Intelligent Transportation System

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) helps to improve traffic efficiency and ensure traffic safety. The core of this system is the collection and analysis of sensor data and vehicle communication technologies. The challenges of ITS mainly focus on two aspects: computing and communication, while security and interoperability are the prerequisites of the system. Existing network architecture and communication technology still cannot meet the demand for advanced intelligent driving support and rapid development of intelligent transportation. As an emerging concept, fog computing is proposed for various IoT scenarios and can address the challenges in intelligent transportation system. Fog computing enables the critical functions of ITS by collaborating, cooperating, and utilizing the resources of underlying infrastructures within roads, smart highways, and smart cities. Fog computing will address the technical challenges in ITS and will help scale the deployment environment for billions of personal and commercial smart vehicles. In this chapter, we first introduced the definition and development of ITS, describing the ecosystem composition and their respective requirements. Then, we explained the challenges and a stage-of-the-art of ITS, mainly focusing on vehicle station and communication network. To present fog computing, the architecture of fog-enabled ITS was provided. And we also discussed how fog computing can address the technical challenges and provide strong support for ITS. Finally, several use cases in fog-enabled ITS, including autonomous driving, cooperative driving, and shared vehicles, are shown in this chapter, which further verifies the benefits that fog computing can bring to ITS.