Sensor cloud computing for vehicular applications: from analysis to practical implementation

Advances in sensor cloud computing to support vehicular applications are becoming more important as the need to better utilize computation and communication resources and make them energy efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to minimize energy consumption of processing a vehicular application within mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN) while satisfying a certain completion time requirement. Specifically, the application can be optimally partitioned, offloaded and executed with helps of peer sensor devices, e.g., a smart phone, thus the proposed solution can be treated as a joint optimization of computing and networking resources. Our theoretical analysis is supplemented by simulation results to show the significance of energy saving by 63% compared to the traditional cloud computing methods. Moreover, a prototype cloud system has been developing to validate the efficiency of sensor cloud strategies in dealing with diverse vehicular applications.