Resource efficient allocation of fog nodes for faster vehicular OTA updates

Despite reduced network latency and resilience, fog computing has not been leveraged for vehicular Over-the-Air (OTA) updates. Due to vehicle mobility and traffic, the resource utilization of fog nodes is almost non-deterministic, which increases the delay in communication and handover. In this paper, we propose an approach for distributing fog nodes by analyzing the vehicular traffic pattern in a region. The proposed method: (a) finds the optimal number of fog nodes for a specific time interval based on the traffic pattern of a region and (b) maximizes the net reserve resources enabling specific fog nodes. To do so, we use the k-means algorithm to identify traffic load and distribute the fog nodes using our proposed algorithm to maximize fog resource utilization. We present a case study of OTA updates that considers vehicle mobility, data transmission rate, propagation delay and handover delay to predict the required update time. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method of fog node allocation extends the net reserve resources by 30.92% on an average, and reduces the OTA update time.