Fog computing has emerged as a promising technology that can bring the cloud applications closer to the physical IoT devices at the network edge. While it is widely known what cloud computing is, and how data centers can build the cloud infrastructure and how applications can make use of this infrastructure, there is no common picture on what fog computing and a fog node, as its main building block, really is. One of the first attempts to define a fog node was made by Cisco, qualifying a fog computing system as a mini-cloud, located at the edge of the network and implemented through a variety of edge devices, interconnected by a variety, mostly wireless, communication technologies. Thus, a fog node would be the infrastructure implementing the said mini-cloud. Other proposals have their own definition of what a fog node is, usually in relation to a specific edge device, a specific use case or an application. In this paper, we first survey the state of the art in technologies for fog computing nodes as building blocks of fog computing, paying special attention to the contributions that analyze the role edge devices play in the fog node definition. We summarize and compare the concepts, lessons learned from their implementation, and show how a conceptual framework is emerging towards a unifying fog node definition. We focus on core functionalities of a fog node as well as in the accompanying opportunities and challenges towards their practical realization in the near future.

What is a Fog Node A Tutorial on Current Concepts towards a Common Definition

On-demand shared mobility is increasingly being promoted as an influential strategy to address urban transport challenges in large and fast-growing cities. The appeal of this form of transport is largely attributed to its convenience, ease of use, and affordability made possible through digital platforms and innovations. The convergence of the shared economy with a number of established and emerging technologies—such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud and Fog computing—is helping to expedite their deployment as a new form of public transport. Recently, this has manifested itself in the form of Flexible Mobility on Demand (FMoD) solutions, aimed at meeting personal travel demands through flexible routing and scheduling. Increasingly, these shared mobility solutions are blurring the boundaries with existing forms of public transport, particularly bus operations. This paper presents an environmental scan and analysis of the technological, social, and economic impacts surrounding disruptive technology-driven shared mobility trends. Specifically, the paper includes an examination of current and anticipated external factors that are of direct relevance to collaborative and low carbon mobility. The paper also outlines how these trends are likely to influence the mobility industries now and into the future. The paper collates information from a wide body of literature and reports on findings from actual ‘use cases’ that exist today which have used these disruptive mobility solutions to deliver substantial benefits to travellers around the world. Finally, the paper provides stakeholders with insight into identifying and responding to the likely needs and impacts of FMoD and informs their policy and strategy positions on the implementation of smart mobility systems in their cities and jurisdictions.

Flexible Mobility On-Demand: An Environmental Scan

Smart Transportation applications by nature are examples of Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANETs) applications where mobile vehicles, roadside units and transportation infrastructure interplay with one another to provide value added services. While there are abundant researches that focused on the communication aspect of such Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, there are few research bodies that target the development of VANET applications. Among the popular VANET applications, a dominant direction is to leverage Cloud infrastructure to execute and deliver applications and services. Recent studies showed that Cloud Computing is not sufficient for many VANET applications due to the mobility of vehicles and the latency sensitive requirements they impose. To this end, Fog Computing has been proposed to leverage computation infrastructure that is closer to the network edge to compliment Cloud Computing in providing latency-sensitive applications and services. However, applications development in Fog environment is much more challenging than in the Cloud due to the distributed nature of Fog systems. In this paper, we investigate how Smart Transportation applications are developed following Fog Computing approach, their challenges and possible mitigation from the state of the arts.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2989275.2989286

On Developing Smart Transportation Applications in Fog Computing Paradigm

Distributed coordination control of traffic network flow using adaptive genetic algorithm based on cloud computing

Intelligent Transport Systems ITS fall in the framework of cyberphysical systems due to the interaction between physical systems vehicles and distributed information acquisition and dissemination infrastructure. With the accelerated development of wireless Vehicle-to-Vehicle V2V and Vehicle-to Infrastructure V2I communications, the integrated acquiring and processing of information is becoming feasible at an increasingly large scale. Accurate prediction of the traffic information in real time, such as the speed, flow, density has important applications in many areas of Intelligent Transport systems. It is a challenging problem due to the dynamic changes of the traffic states caused by many uncertain factors along a travelling route. In this paper we present a V2V based Speed Profile Prediction approach V2VSPP that was developed using neural network learning to predict the speed of selected agents based on the received signal strength values of communications between pairs of vehicles. The V2VSPP was trained and evaluated by using traffic data provided by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. It contains vehicle state information, vehicle-to-vehicle communications and road maps with high temporal resolution for large numbers of interacting vehicles over a long time period. The experimental results show that the proposed approach V2VSPP has the capability of providing accurate predictions of speed profiles in multi-vehicle trajectories setup.

/pdf/speed-profile-prediction-in-intelligent-transport-systems-3blhldmbns.pdf

Speed Profile Prediction in Intelligent Transport Systems Exemplified by Vehicle to Vehicle Interactions

 Abstract—Intelligent transportation clouds could provide Services such as autonomy, mobility, decision support and the standard development Environment for traffic management strategies, and so on. With mobile agent technology, an urban-traffic management system based on Agent-Based Distributed and Adaptive Platforms for Transportation Systems (Adapts) is both feasible and effective. However, the large-scale use of mobile agents will lead to the emergence of a complex, powerful organization layer that requires enormous computing and power resources. To deal with this problem, we propose a prototype urban-traffic management system using multi agent based intelligent traffic clouds. Cloud computing can help us to handle the large amount of storage resources and mass transportation of data effectively and efficiently.

Kavita Deshmukh

Papers

Cloud Computing for Intelligent Transportation System