ABSTRACT

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are specific types of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) in which the mobile nodes are moving vehicles. The vehicles consist of on-board units and a group of sensors to gather data and to communicate with the other vehicles and the roadside units (RSUs). VANETs have received increased attention in recent years due to its numerous applications in surveillance services, emergency situations, route planning and traffic alert broadcasting. VANETs have been depending on cloud computing services for networking, computing and data storage. With the emergence of advanced vehicular applications, the demands for powerful communication and computation facilities with low latency and uninterrupted services have been increasing. With cloud computing unable to satisfy these demands, the focus has shifted to bring computation and communication facilities nearer to the vehicle and even utilizing vehicles as infrastructures, leading to the emergence of Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC). VFC utilizes vehicles as infrastructures for communication and computation and also installs highly virtualized computing, communication and storage facilities at the proximity of these vehicles. This implementation of VFC comes with a number of issues and open problems. This study provides insights into this latest promising technology of Vehicular Fog Computing and discusses issues and challenges in its implementation with future trends in this domain.