Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC), based on the Edge Computing motivation and fundamentals, is a promising technology supporting Intelligent Transport Systems services, smart city applications, and urban computing. VEC can provide and manage computational resources closer to vehicles and end-users, providing access to services at lower latency and meeting the minimum execution requirements for each service type. This survey describes VEC’s concepts and technologies; we also present an overview of existing VEC architectures, discussing them and exemplifying them through layered designs. Besides, we describe the underlying vehicular communication in supporting resource allocation mechanisms. With the intent to overview the risks, breaches, and measures in VEC, we review related security approaches and methods. Finally, we conclude this survey work with an overview and study of VEC’s main challenges. Unlike other surveys in which they are focused on content caching and data offloading, this work proposes a taxonomy based on the architectures in which VEC serves as the central element. VEC supports such architectures in capturing and disseminating data and resources to offer services aimed at a smart city through their aggregation and the allocation in a secure manner.

With the recent advances in the telecommunications and auto industries, we have witnessed growing interest in ITS, of which VANETs are an essential component. SDN can bring advantages to ITS through its ability to provide flexibility and programmability to networks through a logically centralized controller entity that has a comprehensive view of the network. However, as the SDN paradigm initially had fixed networks in mind, adapting it to work on VANETs requires some changes to address particular characteristics of this kind of scenario, such as the high mobility of its nodes. There has been initial work on bringing SDN concepts to vehicular networks to expand its abilities to provide applications and services through the increased flexibility, but most of these studies do not directly tackle the issue of loss of connectivity with said controller entity. In this article, we propose a hierarchical SDN-based vehicular architecture that aims to have improved performance in the situation of loss of connection with the central SDN controller. Simulation results show that our proposal outperforms traditional routing protocols in the scenario where there is no coordination from the central SDN controller.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) rely on Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) to streamline the operation of vehicles by managing vehicle traffic, assisting drivers with safety and sharing information, as well as providing appropriate services for passengers. Traffic congestion is an urban mobility problem, which causes stress to drivers and economic losses. In this context, this work proposes a solution for the detection, dissemination and control of congested roads based on inter-vehicle communication, called INCIDEnT. The main goal of the proposed solution is to reduce the average trip time, CO emissions and fuel consumption by allowing motorists to avoid congested roads. The simulation results show that our proposed solution leads to short delays and a low overhead. Moreover, it is efficient with regard to the coverage of the event and the distance to which the information can be propagated. The findings of the investigation show that the proposed solution leads to (i) high hit rate in the classification of the level of congestion, (ii) a reduction in average trip time, (iii) a reduction in fuel consumption, and (iv) reduced CO emissions