Architectural Design Alternatives based on Cloud/Edge/Fog Computing for Connected Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper surveys various cloud, edge, and fog computing architectures for connected vehicles, classifies them into two categories, and compares their suitability for different CV applications based on functional requirements.

Contribution

It introduces a new classification of architectures into computation-aided and computation-enabled, and provides a comprehensive comparison of these architectures for CVs.

Findings

Different architectures support various CV application QoS needs.

Computation-enabled architectures offer more autonomous processing.

Research challenges vary across architecture types.

Abstract

As vehicles playing an increasingly important role in people's daily life, requirements on safer and more comfortable driving experience have arisen. Connected vehicles (CVs) can provide enabling technologies to realize these requirements and have attracted widespread attentions from both academia and industry. These requirements ask for a well-designed computing architecture to support the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of CV applications. Computation offloading techniques, such as cloud, edge, and fog computing, can help CVs process computation-intensive and large-scale computing tasks. Additionally, different cloud/edge/fog computing architectures are suitable for supporting different types of CV applications with highly different QoS requirements, which demonstrates the importance of the computing architecture design. However, most of the existing surveys on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs overlook the computing architecture design, where they (i) only focus on one specific computing architecture and (ii) lack discussions on benefits, research challenges, and system requirements of different architectural alternatives. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on different architectural design alternatives based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs. The contributions of this paper are: (i) providing a comprehensive literature survey on existing proposed architectural design alternatives based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs, (ii) proposing a new classification of computing architectures based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs: computation-aided and computation-enabled architectures, (iii) presenting a holistic comparison among different cloud/edge/fog computing architectures for CVs based on functional requirements of CV systems, including advantages, disadvantages, and research challenges.