From Autonomous Vehicles to Vehicular Clouds: Challenges of Management, Security and Dependability

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to enhance road safety, reduce traffic pressure and improve the driving experience. With the on-board sensors, compute units, storage devices, and communication modules, autonomous vehicles are becoming integrated information systems. Compared to conventional centralized approaches and traditional clouds, the emerging vehicular clouds (v-clouds) technology is a more promising solution for utilizing such rich resources. In v-clouds, vehicles can communicate with one another, form self-organized vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), collect real-time sensing data, conduct intensive computation, and disseminate information. However, the highly dynamic and heterogeneous nature of autonomous vehicles raises many issues when designing v-cloud systems. In this paper, we focus on the challenges in designing v-cloud computing architectures, providing effective routing protocols, securing v-cloud environments and enhancing the dependability of v-clouds. We review the state of the art and discuss open research issues.