Fog Computing as the Key for Seamless Connectivity Handover in Future Vehicular Networks

With the emergence of highly automated and autonomous connected vehicles, rigorous requirements in terms of responsiveness, security and scalability become necessary to enable new services that improve efficiency and safety on the road. In future networks, vehicles need to frequently perform handover procedures while crossing various dense heterogeneous cells, which may cause an unacceptable network service degradation. In this concept paper, we propose a fog-aided architecture for seamless handover. Fog computing can fill the architectural gap between clients and clouds to manage short lived information and enable novel latency-critical applications at the edge of networks. Accordingly, the proposed architecture, along with its unified integration of virtually all devices (end-devices, gateways and servers) and all networks (ad hoc, access and core), supports Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) distributed applications with crucial needs such as time-, safety-and security-critical network functions.