Future Communications and Energy Management in the Internet of Vehicles: Toward Intelligent Energy-Harvesting

摘要

As an emerging communication platform in the Internet of Things, IoV is promising to pave the way for the establishment of smart cities and provide support for various kinds of applications and services. Energy management in IoV has been attracting an upsurge of interest in both academia and industry. Currently, green IoV mainly focuses on two aspects: energy management of battery-enabled RSUs and EVs. However, these two issues are always resolved separately while ignoring their interactions. This standalone design may cause energy underutilization, a mismatch between traffic demands and energy supplies, as well as high deployment and sustainable costs for RSUs. Therefore, the integration of energy management between battery- enabled RSUs and EVs calls for comprehensive investigation. This article first provides an overview of several promising research fields for energy management in green IoV systems. Given the significance of efficient communications and energy management, we construct an intelligent energy-harvesting framework based on V2I communications in green IoV communication systems. Specifically, we develop a three-stage Stackelberg game to maximize the utilities of both RSUs and EVs in V2I communications. After that, a real-world trajectory-based performance evaluation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme. Finally, we identify and discuss some research challenges and open issues for energy management in green IoV systems.vehicular wireless networks and services have witnessed great advancements in both technology and management capabilities. Vehicular networks commenced as simple ad hoc networks with node-to-node communication capabilities. Today, vehicular networks not only provide sophisticated vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but also make use of state-of-the-art cloud and fog computing frameworks to deliver composite vehicular services and provide energy-efficient service delivery mechanisms. Fog and mobile edge computing spread communication, storage, and computing resources all over the wireless access network, thus providing greater resource and service access to resource- and energy-limited wireless and mobile devices such as smart vehicles. This article envisions a smart city solution that considers collaboration among vehicular and mobile nodes to provide a more energy-efficient service delivery mechanism. Different solutions are examined that consider cloud and fog entities used to deliver continuous and stable simple and complex services for both current and future vehicular node service requests. One of the considered energy-efficient solutions forms clusters of both vehicular and mobile nodes according to their service, energy, and movement characteristics. We show that this solution can further be enhanced using node collaboration to negotiate for optimal services according to users' quality of experience parameter configurations. We compare four different solutions using simulation tests to identify the ones with adequate service delivery guarantees and energy consumption.