The next Paradigm Shift: from Vehicular Networks to Vehicular Clouds

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in vehicular networking and its vast array of potential applications. Increased wireless accessibility of the Internet from vehicles has triggered the emergence of vehicular safety applications, locationspecific applications, and multimedia applications. Recently, Professor Olariu and his coworkers have promoted the vision of Vehicular Clouds (VCs), a non-trivial extension, along several dimensions, of conventional Cloud Computing. In a VC, the under-utilized vehicular resources including computing power, storage and Internet connectivity can be shared between drivers or rented out over the Internet to various customers, very much as conventional cloud resources are. The goal of this chapter is to introduce and review the challenges and opportunities offered by what promises to be the Next Paradigm Shift:From Vehicular Networks to Vehicular Clouds. Specifically, the chapter introduces VCs and discusses some of their distinguishing characteristics and a number of fundamental research challenges. To illustrate the huge array of possible applications of the powerful VC concept, a number of possible application scenarios are presented and discussed. As the adoption and success of the vehicular cloud concept is inextricably related to security and privacy issues, a number of security and privacy issues specific to vehicular clouds are discussed as well. Additionally, data aggregation and empirical results are presented. Mobile Ad Hoc Networking: Cutting Edge Directions, Second Edition. Edited by Stefano Basagni, Marco Conti, Silvia Giordano, and Ivan Stojmenovic. © 2013 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.