BEGIN: Big Data Enabled Energy-Efficient Vehicular Edge Computing

Vehicular edge computing is essential to support future emerging multimedia-rich and delay-sensitive applications in vehicular networks. However, the massive deployment of edge computing infrastructures induces new problems including energy consumption and carbon pollution. This motivates us to develop BEGIN (Big data enabled EnerGy-efficient vehIcular edge computiNg), a programmable, scalable, and flexible framework for integrating big data analytics with vehicular edge computing. In this article, we first present a comprehensive literature review. Then the overall design principle of BEGIN is described with an emphasis on computing domain and data domain convergence. In the next section, we classify big data in BEGIN into four categories and then describe their features and potential values. Four typical application scenarios in BEGIN including node deployment, resource adaptation and workload allocation, energy management, and proactive caching and pushing, are provided to illustrate how to achieve energy-efficient vehicular edge computing by using big data. A case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of BEGIN and the superiority of big data in energy efficiency improvement. Finally, we conclude this work and outline future research open issues.