towards autonomous vehicular clouds

Old Dominion University

Towards Autonomous Vehicular Clouds

AdHocNets 2010, Victoria, BC, August 2010 1

M. EltoweissyS. OlariuM. Younis

9/16/2010


Outline

• What is VANET?• What is cloud computing?• Why vehicular clouds?

AdHocNets 2010, Victoria, BC, August 2010

• Why vehicular clouds?• Potential applications• Research challenges• A call to action

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VANET – the dream


F. Doetzer, Privacy Issues in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks


VANET – the killer app

• Huge potential societal impact• An overnight success with

� automotive industry� various government agencies (USDOT, FCC, etc )


� standardization bodies: ASTM, IEEE, SAE, ISO

• Emergence of projects and initiatives� Car-2-Car communication consortium � Vehicle Safety Consortium� Vehicle Infrastructure Integration� Networks on Wheels


Smart vehicles (1)

• Vehicles are becoming more sophisticated� powerful on-board computing capabilities� tons of on-board of storage


� tons of on-board of storage� significant communication capabilities� no power limitations

• Computations capabilities supported by� hosts of sensors and actuators� on-board radar and GPS

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Smart vehicles (2)



Cloud computing

• A paradigm shift suggested by� low cost high-speed Internet� virtualization� advances in parallel and distributed databases


� advances in parallel and distributed databases

• Basic idea: why buy when you can rent� exactly what you need� exactly when you need it

• Appealing to startups and other players� no upfront investment� no maintenance costs

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Cloud services

• Software as a Service (SaaS)� customers rent software hosted by the vendor

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)


� customers rent infrastructure and programming tools hosted by the vendor to create their own applications

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)� customers rent processing, storage, networking and other

fundamental computing resources for all purposes

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Vehicular clouds ‒ motivation

• Consider the parking lot of a typical company on a typical workday

• hundreds/thousands cars gounused for hours on end

AdHocNets 2010, Victoria, BC, August 2010 9 9/16/2010

unused for hours on end

• Why rent computational/storageresources elsewhere?• you have them in your own backyard• they are yours to waste!


AVC – autonomous vehicular cloud

• Vehicles are ideal candidates for nodes in clouds of various resources

• Autonomous Vehicular Cloud (AVC)� a group of autonomous vehicles whose corporate computing,


� a group of autonomous vehicles whose corporate computing, sensing, communication and physical resources can be coordinated and dynamically allocated to authorized users

• How are AVCs different?� mobility� agility� autonomy


How are AVCs different?

• Mobility: the presence of vehicles in close proximity to an event is often un-planned� pooling of the resources in support of mitigating the event must occur

spontaneously


spontaneously

• Agility: refers to the ability of AVCs to tailor the amount of shared resources to the actual needs of the situation in support of which the AVC was constituted� agility does not exist in conventional clouds and is an important defining

characteristic of AVCs

• Autonomy: refers to the decision of each vehicle to participate in the AVC


A TLSP application

• Traffic Light Synchronization Project (TLSP) a major US-DOT initiative

• Consider a city block where a traffic-related event has occurred• Once the traffic event has been cleared, relying on the existing


• Once the traffic event has been cleared, relying on the existing scheduling of the traffic lights will not help dissipate the traffic backlog in an efficient way

• Our solution� the vehicles themselves will pool their computational resources together

creating the effect of a powerful super-computer � the AVC will recommend to a higher authority a way of rescheduling the

traffic lights that will serve the purpose of de-congesting the afflicted area as fast as possible


AVC for planned evacuations (1)

• In cases of predicted disasters, massive planned evacuations are often necessary in order to minimize the impact of the predicted disaster on human lives

• Once an evacuation is underway, finding available gasoline, drinking water, shelter and medical facilities quickly becomes an


drinking water, shelter and medical facilities quickly becomes an issue

• The 2005 hurricane evacuations in New Orleans and Houston have confirmed that there is no room for mistakes or misjudgments here


AVC for planned evacuations (2)

• How can an AVC help?• We anticipate that the vehicles

involved in the evacuation will self-organize into one or several inter-operating AVC that will


inter-operating AVC that will work hand in hand with the emergency management center

• In the course of this interaction, the emergency managers can upload information about open shelters to the central server


How is an AVC set up?

• The formation of an AVC involves the following:� a broker elected spontaneously will attempt to form an AVC� the broker will secure a preliminary authorization from a higher (city) forum� the broker will inform the vehicles in the area of the received authorization and will

invite participation in the AVC.


invite participation in the AVC.� the cars will/or will not respond to the invitation on a purely autonomous basis� the broker decides if a sufficient number of vehicles have volunteered and will then

announce the formation of the AVC� the cars in the AVC will pool their computational resources to form a powerful

supercomputer that, using a digital map of the area, will produce a proposal schedule to the higher (city) forum for approval and implementation

� once the proposal has been accepted and implemented, the AVC is dissolved


AVC research challenges

• To make AVCs reality research is needed along the following three engineering dimensions


� architectural � functional � operational and policy


AVC architectural challenges

• Elastic mobile architecture� AVC networking and protocol architecture must be developed to accommodate

changing application demands and resource availability on the move

• Resilient architecture


� AVC basic structural and composed building blocks must be designed and engineered to withstand structural stresses induced by the inherent instability in the operating environment.

• Service-oriented network architecture� contemporary layered network architectures, (e.g. the TCP/IP stack) have

proven inadequate in face of evolving applications and technologies� we envision the adoption of service-oriented component-based network

architectures with intrinsic monitoring and learning capabilities


AVC functional challenges

• Enabling AVC autonomy� research is needed on developing a trustworthy base, negotiation and strategy,

efficient communication protocols, data processing and decision support systems, etc.

• Managing highly dynamic cloud membership


• Managing highly dynamic cloud membership� there is a critical need to efficiently manage mobility, resource heterogeneity,

trust, and vehicle membership

• Cyber-Physical control� AVCs can be defined by their aggregated cyber and physical resources. Their

aggregation, coordination and control are non-trivial research issues.

• Cooperation between AVCs


AVC policy challenges

• Trust and trust assurance� research is needed on developing a trustworthy base, negotiation and strategy

formulation methodology, efficient communication protocols, data processing

• Contract-driven versus ad hoc AVC� we anticipate that the bulk of AVCs will be contract-driven, where the owner of


the vehicle or fleet consents to renting out some form of excess computational or storage capacity

� in addition to the contract-based form of AVC, there should be possible to form a AVC in an ad hoc manner as necessitated by dynamically changing situations

• Effective operational policies� In order for the AVCs to operate and inter-operate seamlessly, issues related to

authority establishment and management, decision support and control structure, the establishment of accountability metrics, assessment and intervention strategies, rules and regulations, standardization, etc.


A call to action

• We expect cloud computing to see a phenomenal adoption rate and penetration of the IT market

• As cloud computing takes root it will be emulated by other areas


areas• It is only a matter of time before it will be extended to

• vehicular assets from individual vehicles to entire fleets• cell phones and other commodity consumer products

• Are we ready for this paradigm shift?

towards autonomous vehicular clouds

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