Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising paradigm that provides cloud computing services closer to vehicular users. In VEC, vehicles and communication infrastructures can form pools with computational resources to meet vehicular services with low-latency constraints. These resource pools are known as Vehicular Cloud (VC). The usage of VC resources requires a task scheduling process. In this case, depending on its complexity, a vehicular service can be divided into different tasks. An efficient task scheduling needs to orchestrate where and for how long such tasks will run, considering the available pools, the mobility of nodes, and the tasks deadline constraints. Thus, this article proposes an efficient VC task scheduler based on an approximation heuristic and resources prediction to select the best VC for each task, called MARINA. MARINA aims to analyze the behavior of vehicles that share their computational resources with the VC and make scheduling decisions based on the mobility (VC availability) of these vehicles. Simulation results under a realistic scenario demonstrate the efficiency of MARINA compared to existing state-of-the-art mechanisms in terms of the number of tasks scheduled, monetary cost, system latency, and Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilization.
Frustrations, monetary losses, lost time, high fuel consumption and CO emissions are some of the problems caused by traffic jams in urban centers. In an attempt to solve this problem, this article proposes a traffic service to control congestion, named FOXS–Fast Offset Xpath Service. FOXS aims to reduce the problems generated by a traffic jam in a distributed way through roads classification and the suggestion of new routes to vehicles. Unlike the related works, FOXS is modeled using the Fog computing paradigm. Therefore, it is possible to take advantage of the inherent aspects of this paradigm, such as low latency, processing load balancing, scalability, geographical correlation and the reduction of bandwidth usage. In order to validate FOXS, our performance evaluation considers two realistic urban scenarios with different characteristics. When compared with related works, FOXS shows a reduction in stop time by up to 70%, the CO emissions by up to 29% and, the planning time index by up to 49%. When considering communication evaluation metrics, FOXS reaches a better result than other solutions on the packet collisions metric (up to 11.5%) and on the application delay metric (up to 30%).
Technological advancement is currently focused on the miniaturization of devices, and integrated circuits allow us to observe the increase in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Most IoT services and devices require an Internet connection, which needs to provide the minimum processing, storage and networking requirements to best serve a requested service. One of the main goals of 5G networks is to comply with the user’s various Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in different application scenarios. Fifth-generation networks use Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) concepts to achieve these QoS requirements. However, the computational resource allocation mechanisms required by the services are considered very complex. Thus, in this paper, we propose an allocation and management resources mechanism for 5G networks that uses MEC and simple mathematical methods to reduce the model complexity. The mechanism decides to allocate the resource in MEC to meet the requirements requested by the user. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism provides a larger amount of services, leading to a reduction in the service lock number and as a reduction in the blocking ratio of services due to the accuracy of the approach and its load balancing in the process of resource allocation.