A Novel Parking Management in Smart City Vehicular Datacenters

Researchers have shown that most vehicles spend the majority of their time parked in parking garages, lots, or driveways. During this time, their computing resources are unused and untapped. This has led to substantial interest in Vehicular Cloud, an area of research in which each vehicle acts as a computation node. The main difference between traditional cloud computing and vehicular cloud computing is the availability of nodes. In traditional clouds, nodes are available 24/7, while in vehicular clouds, nodes (vehicles) are only available while parked in parking lots. This creates a dynamic environment as vehicles enter and exit parking garages at random. In this paper, we present a novel framework called ADAM (Auction-based Datacenter Management) for Vehicular Cloud. It uses auction and market design approaches and makes the following contributions: (1) integration of software agents that can search, bid, price, and allocate jobs on behalf of stakeholders, (2) formulation of a truthful auction-based job management system that unifies job allocation, scheduling, and pricing strategies, and (3) simulation studies demonstrating substantial performance benefits. The results of our simulations show that the proposed interactive agents enable efficient processing of large amounts of data, leading to cost savings for stakeholders, reducing the load on conventional clouds, and improving the utility of parked vehicles and parking facilities.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/gradposters2023_sciences/1019/thumbnail.jp

Resource Allocation in Vehicular Cloud Computing

Recently, we have witnessed the emergence of Cloud Computing, a paradigm shift adopted by information technology (IT) companies with a large installed infrastructure base that often goes under-utilized. The unmistakable appeal of cloud computing is that it provides scalable access to computing resources and to a multitude of IT services. Cloud computing and cloud IT services have seen and continue to see a phenomenal adoption rate around the world. Recently, Professor Olariu and his coworkers through series of research introduced a new concept, Vehicular Cloud Computing. A Vehicular Cloud (VC) is a network of vehicles in a parking lot that can provide computation services to users. In this model each vehicle is a computation node. Some of the applications of a VC include a datacenter at the airport, a data cloud in a parking lot, and a datacenter at the mall. The defining difference between vehicular and conventional clouds lies in the distributed ownership and, consequently, the unpredictable availability of computational resources. As cars enter and leave the parking lot, new computational resources become available while others depart, creating a dynamic environment where the task of efficiently assigning jobs to cars becomes very challenging. Our main contribution is a number of scheduling and fault-tolerant job assignment strategies, based on redundancy, that mitigate the effect of resource volatility in vehicular clouds. We offer a theoretical analysis of the expected job completion time in the case where cars do not leave during a checkpoint operation and also in the case where cars may leave while checkpointing is in progress, leading to system failure. A comprehensive set of simulations have shown that our theoretical predictions are accurate. We considered two different environments for scheduling strategy: deterministic and stochastic. In a deterministic environment the arrival and departure of cars are known. This scenario is for environments like universities where employees should be present at work with known schedules and the university rents out its employees\u27 cars as computation nodes to provide services as a vehicular cloud. We presented a scheduling model for a vehicular cloud based on mixed integer linear programming. This work investigates a job scheduling problem involving non-preemptive tasks with known processing time where job migration is allowed. Assigning a job to resources is valid if the job has been executed fully and continuously (no interruption). A job cannot be executed in parallel. In our approach, the determination of an optimal job schedule can be formulated as maximizing the utilization of VC and minimizing the number of job migrations. Utilization can be calculated as a time period that vehicles have been used as computation resources. For dynamic environment in terms of resource availability, we presented a stochastic model for job assignment. We proposed to make job assignment in VC fault tolerant by using a variant of the checkpointing strategy. Rather than saving the state of the computation, at regular times, the state of the computation is only recorded as needed. Also, since we do not assume a central server that stores checkpointed images, like conventional cloud providers do, in our strategy checkpointing is performed by a car and the resulting image is stored by the car itself. Once the car leaves, the image is lost. We consider two scenarios: in the first one, cars do not leave during checkpointing; in the second one, cars may leave during checkpointing, leading to system failure. Our main contribution is to offer theoretical predictions of the job execution time in both scenarios mentioned above. A comprehensive set of simulations have shown that our theoretical predictions are accurate

Towards Dynamic Vehicular Clouds

Motivated by the success of the conventional cloud computing, Vehicular Clouds were introduced as a group of vehicles whose corporate computing, sensing, communication, and physical resources can be coordinated and dynamically allocated to authorized users. One of the attributes that set Vehicular Clouds apart from conventional clouds is resource volatility. As vehicles enter and leave the cloud, new computing resources become available while others depart, creating a volatile environment where the task of reasoning about fundamental performance metrics becomes very challenging. The goal of this thesis is to design an architecture and model for a dynamic Vehicular Cloud built on top of moving vehicles on highways. We present our envisioned architecture for dynamic Vehicular Cloud, consisting of vehicles moving on the highways and multiple communication stations installed along the highway, and investigate the feasibility of such systems. The dynamic Vehicular Cloud is based on two-way communications between vehicles and the stations. We provide a communication protocol for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications enabling a dynamic Vehicular Cloud. We explain the structure of the proposed protocol in detail and then provide analytical predictions and simulation results to investigate the accuracy of our design and predictions. Just as in conventional clouds, job completion time ranks high among the fundamental quantitative performance figures of merit. In general, predicting job completion time requires full knowledge of the probability distributions of the intervening random variables. More often than not, however, the data center manager does not know these distribution functions. Instead, using accumulated empirical data, she may be able to estimate the first moments of these random variables. Yet, getting a handle on the expected job completion time is a very important problem that must be addressed. With this in mind, another contribution of this thesis is to offer easy-to-compute approximations of job completion time in a dynamic Vehicular Cloud involving vehicles on a highway. We assume estimates of the first moment of the time it takes the job to execute without any overhead attributable to the working of the Vehicular Cloud. A comprehensive set of simulations have shown that our approximations are very accurate. As mentioned, a major difference between the conventional cloud and the Vehicular Cloud is the availability of the computational nodes. The vehicles, which are the Vehicular Cloud\u27s computational resources, arrive and depart at random times, and as a result, this characteristic may cause failure in executing jobs and interruptions in the ongoing services. To handle these interruptions, once a vehicle is ready to leave the Vehicular Cloud, if the vehicle is running a job, the job and all intermediate data stored by the departing vehicle must be migrated to an available vehicle in the Vehicular Cloud