Guest Editorial Special Issue on Vehicular Clouds

Cloud Computing, a catchy metaphor for utility computing, implemented through the provisioning of various types of hosted services over the Internet, has seen phenomenal growth and quasi-universal adoption in the past two decades. The underlying business model of cloud computing is the familiar “pay-as-you-go” model of metered services, where a user pays for whatever he/she uses and no more, and where additional demand for service can be met in real time. This powerful idea was suggested, at least in part, by the pervasive low-cost high-speed Internet, a good handle on virtualization, and advances in parallel and distributed computing. Three aspects are novel in conventional cloud computing: First, it gives users the illusion of infinite computing resources available to them on demand. Second, it eliminates the up-front financial commitment by cloud users, allowing them to increase hardware/software resources as needed. Third, it gives users the ability to pay for resources on a short-term basis and release them when they are no longer needed.