Vehicles as Connected Resources: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future

With the introduction of smartphones, cloud and edge computing, and mobile Internet, the automotive ecosystem is shifting toward the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). This article looks at the evolution leading to the IoV and identifies related research and engineering challenges, including 1) coexistence of cloud, edge computing, and data caching strategies at the edge; 2) integration of data processing and management as IoV services; and 3) seamless interoperability among vehicular sensors, computing platforms, and consumer devices. To address these challenges, we present an Internet of Things (IoT) architecture that considers vehicles as IoT resources and provides 1) mechanisms to integrate them in an IoV ecosystem and 2) seamless interoperation among components (e.g., vehicular sensors, computational platform, and consumers). The functional elements and operational stages of the architecture also assist in maintaining interoperability among the components.