When Intelligent Transportation Systems Sensing Meets Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

The widespread use of mobile devices and sensors has motivated data-driven applications that can leverage the power of big data to benefit many aspects of our daily life, such as health, transportation, economy, and environment. Under the context of smart city, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), as a main building block of modern cities, and edge computing (EC), as an emerging computing service that targets addressing the limitations of cloud computing, have attracted increasing attention in the research community in recent years. It is well believed that the application of EC in ITS will have considerable benefits to transportation systems regarding efficiency, safety, and sustainability. Despite the growing trend in ITS and EC research, a big gap in the existing literature is identified: the intersection between these two promising directions has been far from well explored. In this paper, we focus on a critical part of ITS, i.e., sensing, and conducting a review on the recent advances in ITS sensing and EC applications in this field. The key challenges in ITS sensing and future directions with the integration of edge computing are discussed.