Vehicular micro cloud in action: On gateway selection and gateway handovers

Recently, the concept of the vehicular micro cloud has been established. The core idea is to use cars as a main ICT resource in modern smart cities being able to store, to forward, and to process data. Relying on the communication capabilities of cars, particularly their ability to use short range communication technologies such as IEEE 802.11p, Wi-Fi, or LTE-D2D, virtual micro clouds can be established similar to the concept of the mobile edge in 5G networks, yet, without any infrastructure support. However, there is a key disadvantage: the network will very likely become fragmented due to the mobility of the cars within the city. Furthermore, low penetration rates in early deployments may amplify this fragmentation. In recent work, we proposed the use of clusters of parked cars to overcome such limitations, i.e., to provide a virtual infrastructure in form of a virtual Roadside Unit (RSU) being able to fulfill all the mentioned actions. In this paper, we investigate two core problems of this system, namely the selection of appropriate gateway nodes in the virtual cluster as well as seamless handovers among such gateways required due to very limited contact times of moving cars to a single gateway. Our simulation results confirm the strength of the proposed gateway selection and handover mechanisms. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.