Efficient Uplink from Vehicular Micro Cloud Solutions to Data Centers

One of the most recent applications in the vehicular networking domain is distributed data processing using cars as sensors of information. In recent work, the concept of vehicular cloud computing has been explored to provide the necessary scalability and to improve the communication between clusters of cars being called vehicular micro clouds and other participants (cars, bicyclists, pedestrians). In order to provide a bigger picture and also to interconnect such micro clouds, data centers or cloud servers are considered bridging the gap. We study the uplink capabilities from connected cars to such data centers. Options include direct LTE uplinks from all cars, selected use of Roadside Units (RSUs) with back-end connectivity or LTE uplinks from the vehicular micro clouds, and finally hybrid solutions taking network quality and available channel resources into account. Our findings clearly show the advantages of such hybrid solutions both in terms of throughput as well as of optimizing operational costs.