Are Bus-Mounted Edge Servers Feasible?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the feasibility of using buses as mobile edge servers in urban vehicular networks, demonstrating their potential to improve coverage and handle dynamic user demand through a trace-driven approach.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model and a greedy algorithm for selecting buses as edge servers, showing their effectiveness in urban environments based on real-world data.

Findings

Bus-based edge servers cover large geographic areas and demand points.

The proposed algorithm effectively maximizes coverage within budget constraints.

Bus-mounted servers are feasible, beneficial, and valuable for urban vehicular networks.

Abstract

Placement of edge servers is the prerequisite of provisioning edge computing services for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Fixed-site edge servers at Road Side Units (RSUs) or base stations are able to offer basic service coverage for end users, i.e., vehicles on road. However, the server locations and capacity are fixed after deployment, rendering their inefficiency in handling spationtemporal user dynamics. Mobile servers such as buses, on the other hand, have the potential of adding computation elasticity to such system. To this end, this paper studies the feasibility of bus-mounted edge servers based on real traces. First, we investigate the coverage of the buses and base stations using the Shanghai bus/taxi/Telecom datasets, which shows a great potential of bus-based edge servers as they cover a great portion of geographic area and demand points. Next, we build a mathematical model and design a simple greedy heuristic algorithm to select a limited number of buses that maximizes the coverage of demand points, i.e., with a limited purchase budget. We perform trace-driven simulations to verify the performance of the proposed bus selection algorithm. The results show that our approach effectively handles the dynamic user demand under realistic constraints such as server capacity and purchase quantity. Thus, we claim: bus-mounted edge servers for vehicular networks in urban areas are feasible, beneficial, and valuable.