Congestion avoidance through fog computing in internet of vehicles

Recently, internet of vehicles (IoVs) is captivating a lot of interest due to a wide range of applications in various domains. These applications rely on up-to-date information of vehicles for provisioning various services. However, frequent message transmissions by a sheer number of vehicles may not only engulf a centralized server but may also cause a severe congestion which is not suitable for ongoing services specially in emergency situations. The aim of this study is to reduce congestion and messaging overhead. This paper presents a fog-assisted congestion avoidance scheme for IoV named energy efficient message dissemination (E2MD). Unlike most of the existing schemes, E2MD capitalizes the merits of fog computing to minimize communication cost and manage services. Each vehicle is required to update their status to a fog server frequently, either directly or through intermediate nodes. In case of an emergency, the fog server will timely inform upcoming traffic to slow down, dispatch rescue teams to provide necessary services, and coordinate patrolling missions to clear the road. Moreover, failure detection and recovery mechanisms are also presented to ensure availability of the fog server. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated through NS 2.35 simulations. Simulation results confirm the performance reign of E2MD compared to contemporary schemes in terms of latency and communication cost.