A new software-based service provision approach for vehicular cloud

Vehicles belonging to a Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) can form an ad hoc vehicular cloud in order to provide and to share services between the vehicles. These services may be divided into two categories: (1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) describing physical resources shared as services such as data storage, sensor data, network and computing services; and (2) Software as a Service (SaaS) describing applications that can be run as services in the network. In this paper, a SaaS is an infotainment application requiring multiple infrastructural services such as sensor data. In this context, we propose a service provision mechanism well adapted for VANET. The mechanism aims to select convenient service provider vehicles taking into account the mobility of the vehicles. The mechanism is evaluated by a series of experimentations on OMNeT++ network simulator. The results show a high service delivery ratio representing a satisfactory result for the simulated case study.