Sensor Virtualization and Provision in Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

Nowadays vehicles become self-organized mobile computers thanks to the emerging solutions that are designed to manage interconnection and interaction with the environment such as the IoV. Moreover, the wide spatial-temporal spread nature of these vehicles attracts cloud service providers to exploit under-used resources in the aim of growing their profitability. Virtual sensors represent a promised solution to optimize the exploitation of sensor resources and to offer on-demand services. We propose a Cloud IoV architecture that integrates functional blocks of mobile sensor suppliers, Sensor Cloud Service Provider (SCSP), and service consumers. We design a Markov chain-based solution to predict the availability of mobile sensors. Furthermore, we propose a sensor virtualization technique to optimize the exploitation of sensor devices. To allow the SCSPs to maximize their revenue, we model the utility function of SCSP, and deduce the optimal number of allocated sensors. We also propose a sensor selection algorithm to select the most relevant sensors. A simulation is conducted to assess the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of allocation blockage rate.