A Novel Cloudlet-Dwell-Time Estimation Method for Assisting Vehicular Edge Computing Applications

Recently, to improve the efficiency and safety of the transportation system that is severely affected by the increasing traffic demand, the Internet-of-Vehicles (IoVs)/Vehicular Networks (VNets) have received more and more attention because it can effectively improve the ability of the participants in the transportation system to perceive the traffic environment around them through Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technique. Moreover, V2X also makes it possible to share computing and storage power between vehicles, which further promotes the development of vehicular edge computing (VEC). However, due to the highly dynamic nature of the VNet's topology, based on the instant traffic flow condition, how to determine whether the vehicles on a given road can form a relatively stable cloudlet with certain computing or data storage capabilities to support certain VEC applications becomes a crucial task that needs to be solved. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a Cloudlet-Dwell-time (CDT) estimation method to theoretically derive some essential parameters for implementing VEC applications, i.e., the vehicular cloudlet existence probability and its corresponding dwell-time. We further demonstrate the results of the proposed work based on traffic flow data chosen from the England Highways data set.