Cooperative Fog Computing for Dealing with Big Data in the Internet of Vehicles: Architecture and Hierarchical Resource Management

As vehicle applications, mobile devices and the Internet of Things are growing fast, and developing an efficient architecture to deal with the big data in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been an important concern for the future smart city. To overcome the inherent defect of centralized data processing in cloud computing, fog computing has been proposed by offloading computation tasks to local fog servers (LFSs). By considering factors like latency, mobility, localization, and scalability, this article proposes a regional cooperative fog-computing-based intelligent vehicular network (CFC-IoV) architecture for dealing with big IoV data in the smart city. Possible services for IoV applications are discussed, including mobility control, multi-source data acquisition, distributed computation and storage, and multi-path data transmission. A hierarchical model with intra-fog and inter-fog resource management is presented, and energy efficiency and packet dropping rates of LFSs in CFC-IoV are optimized.