Volunteer Computing in Connected Vehicles: Opportunities and Challenges

With the exponential increase in the number of smart devices and the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the last two decades, a huge demand for computational and storage resources has been observed. This trend has supported a vision toward exploring a novel set of resources beyond the traditional distributed computing paradigms. To deliver this vision, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have garnered a great deal of attention due to a number of vehicles on the roads that can be served as the prospective computational resources in the form of processing and storage units. Given the perspective of resources not being used collectively, we propose volunteer computing based VANET (VCBV) architecture, aimed at utilizing the surplus vehicular resources to deal with the future computational requirements of varied applications including autonomous driving, infotainment systems, healthcare services, and complex simulations. In this context, this study investigates the different aspects of possible integration of VANET and volunteer computing (VC). For this purpose, we describe the system model of VCBV by identifying the major components and their roles. Furthermore, a comprehensive taxonomic classification of VCBV is presented. Moreover, some prospective applications and multiple VCBV scenarios are also envisioned. Finally, a set of challenges is indicated that must be addressed by future studies to fully realize the potential of the proposed architecture.