IsV2C: An Integrated Road Traffic-Network-Cloud Simulator for V2C Connected Car Services

The recent growth of connected car technology encourages IT and vehicle organizations to develop advanced vehicle-to-cloud (V2C) services such as driving assistance, infotainment, and vehicle maintenance. However, since their performances highly depend on the resource configuration and regional characteristics, it is almost impossible to examine the service feasibility in every candidate region by constructing real testbeds. To overcome this problem, we present an integrated road traffic-network-cloud simulator for V2C connected car services (IsV2C) with a user-friendly GUI. The IsV2C aims to evaluate V2C services with the user-specified V2C environment and service scenarios in a particular region. In the IsV2C, road traffic, network, and cloud simulation are intimately linked to reflect both the realistic movement of vehicles and service transactions in real-time. To accurately mimic task execution in both vehicles and the cloud, the IsV2C utilizes a rigorous emulation for evaluated services. Simulation results of the IsV2C show whether each simulated application satisfies the service level objectives regarding service time, cloud cost, and data transmission performance. As for the validation, we evaluated three sample V2C applications in an urban area, and the results proved that the IsV2C could offer useful information to both service providers and cloud providers for their service launching and profit estimation. To the best of our knowledge, the IsV2C is the first work that presents an integrated road traffic-network-cloud simulation framework for an end-to-end V2C service evaluation.