Power Minimization in Vehicular Cloud Architecture

Modern vehicles equipped with on-board units (OBU) are playing an essential role in the smart city revolution. The vehicular processing resources, however, are not used to their fullest potential. The concept of vehicular clouds is proposed to exploit the underutilized vehicular resources to supplement cloud computing services to relieve the burden on cloud data centers and improve quality of service. In this paper we introduce a vehicular cloud architecture supported by fixed edge computing nodes and the central cloud. A mixed integer linear programming (MLP) model is developed to optimize the allocation of the computing demands in the distributed architecture while minimizing power consumption. The results show power savings as high as 84% over processing in the conventional cloud. A heuristic with performance approaching that of the MILP model is developed to allocate computing demands in real time.