Cost-and-Delay Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation in Federated Vehicular Clouds

Modern vehicular applications are resource-intensive and have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this direction, Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) has emerged as a new paradigm to host such applications in the cloud. In this paper, we extend the VCC paradigm to include federation, wherein the data centers from multiple cloud providers are pooled in to support applications that can not be supported in a single provider. We address the problem of dynamic resource allocation in a federated vehicular cloud. We propose a dynamic resource pricing model for sharing resources between the cloud providers, based on which we formulate resource allocation as an optimization problem. The objective is to minimize the cost of the vehicular service provider while meeting the delay bounds of different vehicular applications, for which a cost and delay-aware, polynomial-time algorithm is proposed. We evaluate the proposed algorithm under different scenarios to show that exploiting federation brings great benefits for the service providers and end-users alike. The proposed algorithm is seen to meet the delay requirements with a significant cost reduction to the provider up to 50% compared to baseline methods. We also show that the proposed algorithm can serve more than 90% of requests with lower cost and fewer VM migrations. It reduces the number of VM migrations by 72%.