Abstract
The strict latency constraints of emerging vehicular applications make
it unfeasible to forward sensing data from vehicles to the cloud for
processing. To shorten network latency, Vehicular fog computing (VFC)
moves computation to the edge of the Internet, with the extension to
support the mobility of distributed computing entities. In other words,
VFC proposes to complement stationary fog nodes co-located with cellular
base stations with mobile ones carried by moving vehicles. Previous
works of VFC mainly focus on optimizing the assignments of computing
tasks among available fog nodes. However, capacity planning, which
decides where and how much capacity to deploy, remains an open and
challenging issue. The complexity of this problem comes from the
mobility of vehicles, the spatio-temporal dynamics of vehicular traffic,
and the computing resource demand generated by varying vehicular
applications. To solve the above challenges, we propose a data-driven
capacity planning framework that optimizes the deployment of stationary
and mobile fog nodes to minimize the installation and operational costs
under the quality-of-service constraints, taking into account the
spatio-temporal variation in computing demand. Through real-world
experiments, we analyze the cost efficiency potential of VFC in long
term and demonstrate that the performance loss of VFC is below
$6\%$ compared to stationary deployment with equal
network capacity. We also analyze the impacts of traffic patterns on the
potential cost saving. The results show when the traffic density is
higher, more operational costs will be saved in the long run due to more
dense deployment of mobile fog nodes.