User Experience-Based Provisioning Services in Vehicular Clouds

Abstract

Today, the increasing number of applications based on the Internet of Things, as well as advances in wireless communication, information and communication technology, and mobile cloud computing have allowed users to access a wide range of resources while mobile. Vehicular clouds are considered key elements for today’s intelligent transportation systems. They are outfitted with equipment to enable applications and services for vehicle drivers, surrounding vehicles, pedestrians and third parties. As vehicular cloud computing has become more popular, due to its ability to improve driver and vehicle safety and provide provisioning services and applications, researchers and industry have growing interest in the design and development of vehicular networks for emerging applications. Though vehicle drivers can now access a variety of on-demand resources en route via vehicular network service providers, the development of vehicular cloud provisioning services has many challenges. In this dissertation, we examine the most critical provisioning service challenges drivers face, including, cost, privacy and latency. To this point, very little research has addressed these issues from the driver perspective. Privacy and service latency are certainly emerging challenges for drivers, as are service costs since this is a relatively new financial concept. Motivated by the Quality of Experience paradigm and the concept of the Trusted Third Party, we identify and investigate these challenges and examine the limitations and requirements of a vehicular environment. We found no research that addressed these challenges simultaneously, or investigated their effect on one another. We have developed a Quality of Experience framework that provides scalability and reduces congestion overhead for users. Furthermore, we propose two theory-based frameworks to manage on-demand service provision in vehicular clouds: Auction-driven Multi-objective Provisioning and a Multiagent/Multiobjective Interaction Game System. We present different approaches to these, and show through analytical and simulation results that our potential schemes help drivers minimize costs and latency, and maximize privacy.