Vehicles as Connected Resources: Opportunities and Challenges

With the introduction of smartphones, cloud & edge computing and mobile Internet, the automotive ecosystem is shifting towards the Internet of Vehicle (IoV). This paper looks at this evolution leading to IoV and identifies related research and engineering challenges including (i) co-existence of cloud, edge computing and data caching strategies at the edge, (ii) integration of data processing and management as IoV services and (iii) seamless interoperability among vehicular sensors, computing platforms and consumer devices. To address these challenges, we present an IoT architecture, which considers vehicles as IoT resources and provides (i) mechanisms to integrate them in an IoV ecosystem and (ii) 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.