Edge and Cloud Computing Architectures in Mobility Engineering

Mobility Engineering encompasses concepts, methods, and principles for the design and implementation of vehicular systems to improve mobility. The objectives throughout the system's lifecycle involve ensuring safety, reliability, and interoperability, with the implicit adoption of V2I paradigms. Reliable and safe services typically hosted in the cloud can introduce unacceptable delays, motivating the adoption of Edge Computing. The specific demands, constraints, and expectations imposed by mobility and a corresponding architecture classification are outlined.

Through the distributed character of Edge, Fog, and vehicle-in-the-loop computing, the locality and responsiveness of applications and services can be improved. Yet, these advantages come with a price tag: computing capacity and resources must be close to the user, increasing redundancy in the number of Edge resources deployed. Local Edge resources control, manage, and provide context information to each vehicle, offering not only V2I services but also facilitating E2E, Vehicle2Vehicle, and Vehicle2Pedestrian assistance and safety services. Nevertheless, because these services are not replicated by vendors, they may be offering even better assurance than full redundancy with critical information and services duplicated by computing and storage nodes in the cloud. Deploying computing resources into the vans to reduce costs and allow V2X Collaboration without sending massive amounts of information to the cloud will considerably improve infrastructure resilience while at the same time decreasing E2E latency.