MDP-based Vehicular Network Connectivity Model for VCC Management

Abstract

Vehicular Cloud computing is a new paradigm in which vehicles collaboratively exchange data and resources to support services and problem-solving in urban environments. Characteristically, such Clouds undergo severe challenging conditions from the high mobility of vehicles, and by essence, they are rather dynamic and complex. Many works have explored the assembling and management of Vehicular Clouds with designs that heavily focus on mobility. However, a mobility-based strategy relies on vehicles' geographical position, and its feasibility has been questioned in some recent works. Therefore, we present a more relaxed Vehicular Cloud management scheme that relies on connectivity. This work models uncertainty and considers every possible chance a vehicle may be available through accessible communication means, such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications and the vehicle being in the range of road-side units (RSUs) for data transmissions. We propose an markov-decisision process (MDP) model to track vehicles' connection status and estimate their reliability for data transmissions. Also, from analyses, we observed that higher vehicle connectivity presents a trace of repeated connection patterns. We reinforce the connectivity status by validating it through an availability model to distinguish the vehicles which support high availability regardless of their positioning. The availability model thus determines the suitability of the MDP model in a given environment.