IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO.

2, MAY 2014

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Developing Vehicular Data Cloud

Services in the IoT Environment
Wu He, Gongjun Yan, and Li Da Xu, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractThe advances in cloud computing and internet of
things (IoT) have provided a promising opportunity to resolve the
challenges caused by the increasing transportation issues. We
present a novel multilayered vehicular data cloud platform by using
cloud computing and IoT technologies. Two innovative vehicular
data cloud services, an intelligent parking cloud service and a
vehicular data mining cloud service, for vehicle warranty analysis
in the IoT environment are also presented. Two modied data
mining models for the vehicular data mining cloud service, a Nave
Bayes model and a Logistic Regression model, are presented in
detail. Challenges and directions for future work are also provided.
Index TermsAutomobile service, cloud computing, internet of
things (IoT), intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), serviceoriented architecture (SOA).

I. INTRODUCTION
ODERN VEHICLES are increasingly equipped with a
large amount of sensors, actuators, and communication
devices (mobile devices, GPS devices, and embedded computers).
In particular, numerous vehicles have possessed powerful
sensing, networking, communication, and data processing capabilities, and can communicate with other vehicles or exchange
information with the external environments over various protocols, including HTTP, TCP/IP, SMTP, WAP, and Next Generation Telematics Protocol (NGTP) [1]. As a result, many innovative
telematics services [2], such as remote security for disabling
engine and remote diagnosis, have been developed to enhance
drivers safety, convenience, and enjoyment.
The advances in cloud computing and internet of things (IoT)
have provided a promising opportunity to further address the
increasing transportation issues, such as heavy trafc, congestion, and vehicle safety. In the past few years, researchers have
proposed a few models that use cloud computing for implementing intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). For example, a new
vehicular cloud architecture called ITS-Cloud was proposed to
improve vehicle-to-vehicle communication and road safety [3].

Manuscript received September 12, 2013; revised November 22, 2013;

accepted January 02, 2014. Date of publication January 10, 2014; date of
current version May 02, 2014. This work was supported in part by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC) under Grant
71132008, and in part by U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants
SES-1318470 and 1044845. Paper no. TII-13-0629.
W. He is with Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529 USA (e-mail:
whe@odu.edu).
G. Yan is with the University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN 47712 USA
(e-mail: gyan@usi.edu).
L. D. Xu is with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai
20024, China; with University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei
230026, China; and also with Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529
USA (e-mail: lxu@odu.edu).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TII.2014.2299233

A cloud-based urban trafc control system was proposed to

optimize trafc control [4]. Based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), this system uses a number of software services
(SaaS), such as intersection control services, area management
service, cloud service discovery service, and sensor service, to
perform different tasks. These services also interact with each
other to exchange information and provide a solid basis for
building a collaborative trafc control and processing system in a
distributed cloud environment.
As an emerging technology caused by rapid advances in
modern wireless telecommunication, IoT has received a lot of
attention and is expected to bring benets to numerous application areas including health care, manufacturing, and transportation [5][8]. Currently, the use of IoT in transportation is still in
its early stage and most research on ITSs has not leveraged the
IoT technology as a solution or an enabling infrastructure. To this
end, we propose to use both cloud computing and IoT as an
enabling infrastructure for developing a vehicular data cloud
platform where transportation-related information, such as trafc
control and management, car location tracking and monitoring,
road condition, car warranty, and maintenance information, can
be intelligently connected and made available to drivers, automakers, part-manufacturer, vehicle quality controller, safety
authorities, and regional transportation division. An experiment
of using data mining models to analyze vehicular data clouds in
the IoT environment was also conducted to demonstrate the
feasibility of vehicular data mining service.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we
provide a brief review of vehicular networks, cloud computing in
the automotive domain, and IoT in the automotive domain. In
Section III, we propose a novel multilayered vehicular data cloud
platform using existing cloud computing and IoT technologies.
Section IV presents two innovative vehicular data cloud services;
an intelligent parking cloud service and a vehicular data mining
cloud service for vehicle warranty analysis in the IoT environment. Two modied data mining models for the vehicular data
mining cloud service, a Nave Bayes model and a Logistic
Regression model, are presented in detail. Challenges and directions for future work are given in Section V. Section VI presents
our conclusion.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Vehicular Networks
Wireless technology leads to the development of vehicular
networks in the past decades. The original idea is that the
roadside infrastructure and the radio-equipped vehicles could
communicate using wireless networks. To make networking
operations such as routing more effective, researchers had

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developed a dynamic inter-vehicle network called vehicular

ad-hoc networks (VANET). VANETs were primarily designed
to support the communication between different vehicles (V2 V)
and the communication between vehicles and the roadside
infrastructures (V2I) [9]. VANETs possess hybrid architecture
and integrate ad hoc networks, wireless LAN, and cellular
technology [10] for ITS. Furthermore, many VANET applications were developed by numerous vehicle manufacturers, government agencies, and industrial organizations. Initially, most
VANET applications were focused on improving drivers safety
and offered functions such as trafc monitoring and update,
emergency warning, and road assistance [11]. In recent years,
many nonsafety-related VANET applications, such as entertainment and gaming applications, have been developed.
B. Cloud Computing in the Automotive Domain
Cloud computing has been proposed to reshape vehicular
software and services in the automotive domain. As more and
more cars are equipped with devices that can access the internet,
Olariu et al. [11] propose to integrate existing vehicular networks, various sensors, on-board devices in vehicles, and cloud
computing to create vehicular clouds. They suggest that vehicular clouds are technologically feasible and will have a signicant
impact on the society once they are built. Thus, both existing
automobile software and a variety of information resources are
being virtualized and packaged as services to build vehicular
clouds. Different vehicular services are often combined and used
to implement the mapping, encapsulation, aggregation, and
composition and allow vehicles to interact with various hosted
services outside the vehicles. Currently, using the modular
approach, multilayer and SOAs to integrate various vehicular
resources and services appears to be the most promising model
and framework for building vehicular cloud service platforms.
By using the modular approach to decompose a complex system
into smaller subsystems according to their functions, we can
divide a vehicular cloud service platform into a number of
functional services and subsystems such as trafc administration,
service routing, information processing, vehicle warranty analysis and mining, etc. As cloud computing includes three distinct
servicesplatform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) as well as the popular software as a service (SaaS), a
compound of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS should be leveraged for
building vehicular cloud service platforms. Furthermore, clouds
can also be divided into private, public, and hybrid clouds. Thus,
vehicular cloud service platforms can also be designed to be a
hybrid cloud where some services, such as user information
query, can be hosted on public cloud platforms and other
missing-critical services, such as trafc administration, should
be hosted on private cloud platforms [12]. A taxonomy was
developed to classify VANET-related clouds into the following
three types: 1) vehicles using clouds; 2) vehicular clouds; and
3) hybrid clouds [13].
Multilayer approaches and SOA [14][16] have been proposed
as the main architecture to construct various vehicular cloud
service platforms. Iwai and Aoyama [1] propose to develop a
cloud service system for automobiles (a.k.a., the DARWIN
system) using SOA as an enabling architecture [17], [18].

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MAY 2014

DARWIN contains key service components, such as Service

Process Manager and Service Space, and these components
interact with various services both inside and outside of vehicles
to form a comprehensive vehicular cloud. DARWIN also provides protocols to support interoperability between existing
vehicular software and cloud-based services. Wang et al. [19]
propose a vehicle cloud computing architecture composed of
three functional tiers: 1) cloud service; 2) communication; and
3) device tiers. By using cloud computing techniques such as
SOA, the three-layer architecture allows heterogeneous devices,
network, and services to exchange information and collaborate in
a real-time manner. A three-layer V-Cloud architecture was
proposed [10] to combine vehicular cyber-physical systems with
cloud computing technologies to offer essential services for
drivers. The V-Cloud architecture includes three layers: in-car
vehicular cyber-physical system, V2 V network, and V2I network. Each layer has numerous sub-components. The ITS-Cloud
proposed by Bitam and Mellouk [3] includes three layers: 1) cloud
layer; 2) communication layer; and 3) end-users layer. In particular, the cloud layer was divided into both static and dynamic
cloud to support different services needed by various stakeholders
of the vehicular clouds. A new architecture named VehiCloud
was developed to transform traditional vehicular networks into a
service-oriented cloud architecture [20]. By taking advantage of
emerging cloud computing technologies [21][23], VehiCloud
has been implemented and tested to address V2 V communication
issues and extend the capabilities of embedded devices and
mobile devices though road experiments.
C. IoT in the Automotive Domain
The integration of sensors and communication technologies
provides a way for us to track the changing status of an object
through the Internet. IoT explains a future in which a variety of
physical objects and devices around us, such as various sensors,
radio frequency identication (RFID) tags, GPS devices, and
mobile devices, will be associated to the Internet and allows these
objects and devices to connect, cooperate, and communicate
within social, environmental, and user contexts to reach common
goals [24], [25]. As an emerging technology, the IoT is expected
to offer promising solutions to transform transportation systems
and automobile services in the automobile industry. Speed and
Shingleton [26] propose an idea to use the unique identifying
properties of car registration plates to connect various things. As
vehicles have increasingly powerful sensing, networking, communication, and data processing capabilities, IoT technologies
can be used to harness these capabilities and share under-utilized
resources among vehicles in the parking space or on the road.
For example, IoT technologies make it possible to track each
vehicles existing location, monitor its movement, and predict its
future location.
By integrating with cloud computing, wireless sensor network, RFID sensor networks, satellite network, and other
intelligent transportation technologies, a new generation of
IoT-based vehicular data clouds can be developed and deployed
to bring many business benets, such as predicting increasing
road safety, reducing road congestion, managing trafc, and
recommending car maintenance or repair. Some preliminary

HE et al.: DEVELOPING VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES IN THE IoT ENVIRONMENT

work of using IoT technologies to improve ITSs has been

conducted in recent years. For example, an intelligent informatics system (iDrive system) developed by BMW used various
sensors and tags to monitor the environment, such as tracking the
vehicle location and the road condition, to provide driving
directions [27]. Leng and Zhao [12] propose an intelligent
internet-of-vehicles system (known as IIOVMS) to collect trafc
information from the external environments on an ongoing basis
and to monitor and manage road trafc in real time. Lumpkins
[28] discusses how ITSs could use IoT devices in the vehicle to
connect to the cloud and how numerous sensors on the road could
be virtualized to leverage the processing capabilities of the cloud.
Qin et al. [27] propose a technology architecture that uses cloud
computing, IoT, and middleware technologies to enable the
innovation of automobile services. Zhang et al. [29] designed
an intelligent monitoring system to track the location of refrigerator trucks using IoT technologies.
III. PROPOSED VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD PLATFORM
IN THE IOT ENVIRONMENT
Fig. 1 shows the layered architecture of our proposed IoTbased vehicular data cloud platform. By integrating various
devices such as sensors, actuators, controllers, GPS devices,
mobile phones, and other Internet access equipments, and employing networking technologies (wireless sensor network, cellular network, satellite network, and others), cloud computing,
IOT, and middleware, this platform supports V2 V and V2I
communication mechanisms and is able to collect and exchange
data among the drivers, vehicles, and roadside infrastructure
such as cameras and street lights. The goal of this platform is to
provide real-time, economic, secure, and on-demand services to
customers through the associated clouds including a conventional cloud and a temporary cloud (vehicular cloud) [3]. The
conventional cloud is composed of virtualized computers and
provides SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS to interested customers. For
example, cloud management services and many trafc administration applications can be hosted on the conventional cloud. The
temporary cloud is typically formed on demand and is composed
of under-utilized computing, networking, and storage facilities
of vehicles and is designed to expand the conventional cloud in
order to increase the whole clouds computing, processing, and
storing capabilities. The temporary cloud supports a compound
of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS and primarily hosts highly dynamic
vehicular applications which may have issues running on the
conventional clouds [26]. For example, trafc-related applications and smart parking applications are suitable for the temporary cloud. The temporary cloud often needs to communicate
with the conventional clouds and there is a frequent exchange of
data and services between the two clouds [13]. Based on the
layered architecture in Fig. 1, heterogeneous IoT-related devices,
network, community technologies, and cloud-based services on
different layers can be integrated to exchange information, share
resources, and collaborate on the clouds.
The proposed IoT-based vehicular data cloud platform supports three new cloud services as indicated in Table I [30].
In this proposed layered architecture, different layers have
different purposes. In general, the layers on the bottom provide a

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Fig. 1. Architecture for IoT-based vehicular data clouds.

NOVEL SERVICES

TABLE I
VEHICULAR DATA CLOUDS

FOR IOT-BASED

foundational support for the layers on the top. SOA will be

applied to integrate different information and communication
services and connect in-vehicle and out-vehicle applications
seamlessly through the vehicular data clouds. SOA allows
vehicular application developers to organize, aggregate, and
package applications into new business applications services.
As a mature technology for enterprise application integration,
SOA provides guidelines to integrate heterogeneous web services, applications, and different middleware systems. Middleware is used to hide the implementation details of underlining
technologies and provides support for the integration of specic
applications deployed on the vehicular data cloud [24]. By
leveraging the SOA-based and IoT-based vehicular data cloud
platform, innovative services can be developed by car manufacturers, government agencies, and third-party service provides.
In this section, we propose two innovative vehicular data cloud
services.
IV. VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES
In this section, we are interested in introducing two vehicular
data cloud services as examples of PAAS shown in Section III.

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Fig. 2. Software architecture for intelligent parking cloud service.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MAY 2014

Fig. 3. Vacancy detections by sensors.

One service is intelligent parking cloud service and the other one
is the mining vehicular maintenance data service.
A. Intelligent Parking Cloud Service
Finding available parking space is challenging in many cities
and often leads to issues such as congestion, road accidents, and
psychological frustration. To make it easier to nd available
parking space, an intelligent parking cloud service that collects
and analyzes geographic location information, parking availability information, parking space reservation and order information,
trafc information and vehicle information through sensor
detection and the clouds is needed. Using a modular approach,
a software architecture [31] for implementing the intelligent
parking cloud service is proposed in Fig. 2.
Each vehicle is pre-enlisted with a transceiver with short
transmission range (about 1 m) and a processor with simple
computing capacity. The transceiver can be common devices,
such as zigbee, bluetooth devices, and infrared devices, with low
cost. Both the processor and the wireless transceiver are enlisted
into an event data recorder (EDR). We designed a parking lot with
WIFI network, infrared devices, and parking belts to detect
misparked cars. When a car enters the parking lot and heads to
the reserved parking slot, the entrance booth will validate the
reservation. If the parking spot is validated, a direction-related
guidance will be uploaded to the car for nding the reserved spot.
The infrared device, lights, and parking belt will work together to
detect and prevent misparking. As shown in Fig. 3, the bluetooth
communication will be activated when the front wheel presses the
belt-a. The tamper-resistant device (TRD) and belt-a in Fig. 3 will
validate reservation conrmation as necessary. We use an infrared device to validate whether the car is parked instead of using
the slot for a temporary purpose. If the parking slot is correctly
parked with cars, the light will show green color; otherwise, the
light shows red color. These sensors connect to computer center
to report the status of every parking slot on an ongoing basis.
We also designed an infrastructure to publish advertisement
from the parking lot (see Fig. 4). There are wireless transceiver
towers in the parking lot and multiple transceivers (shown as to
) installed on the roadside. The wireless tower in the
parking lot can obtain vacant slot information from the computer
center where the status of the parking lot is constantly monitored.
Therefore, wireless tower can broadcast the parking lot information and parking plan as business strategies for economical
benets. As the wireless transmission range is limited, we have
roadside transceivers to relay the parking information to remote
areas, as shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4. Parking cloud service.

B. Intelligent Parking Service Models

In this section, the parking process has been modeled as a
birthdeath stochastic process. The parking revenue could be
predicted by using such a model. The birth and the death of
parking mean that a vehicle enters and exits a parking slot at time
, respectively. We were able to obtain the birth and death rate by
using trafc detectors or other sensors [31]. We assume that there
is a huge number of parking slots and this number can be
considered innite for practical purposes. Let
be the
number of slots in occupied time . We write {
} as
a birth and death process. Therefore, we can read for all > ,
> and
. The occupied slot at time is

where is the birth rate and is the death rate. We note the
probability of a car parking event that occurs in (
) is
independent from the number of occupied parking slots at time .

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If
refers to the probability when the number of parking cars
at time is , we can derive the probability of

Based on

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not always true but this assumption can greatly simplify the
problem and reach acceptable accuracy in real problems.
Therefore, we write

We made efforts to nd the best class of Nave Bayes

classication. The best class is typically the maximum of a
posteriori (MAP) class

, we can compute the mean value

C. Mining Vehicular Maintenance Data Service

Another application that we are interested in the proposed
vehicular data cloud is to mine maintenance data. Maintenance of
vehicles are frustrated and heavily loaded for drivers. More
importantly, auto-manufacturers and auto-parts designer and
manufacturers also desperately seek feedback from end users
to improve the quality of producers and enhance competition
capability to the foreign auto-makers. We can merge maintenance data from both users and repair people.
The merged data are nature language text descriptions of
maintenance. We place these texts into main les. To dig out
auto-parts warranty information, we adopt nature language text
mining technologies to these merged texts. As an emerging
research area, currently limited studies have been published
regarding how data mining techniques could be applied to
vehicular networks or clouds. Few models were developed and
tested for mining vehicular data collected from vehicular networks or data clouds. In this section, we present a modied Nave
Bayes model [32] and a Logistic Regression model which have
been adopted in our research of implementing vehicular data
mining cloud service which is introduced in Section IV-C1.
Given a document space
where all documents are represented in this space. We use for
. A set of
xed classes is marked as
. We use for
and a training set
of classied documents. Each labeled document
. A
classier is used to map documents to classes:
. In this
section, we present an optimized model called Nave Bayes
Classier.
1) Nave Bayes Classier: In the Nave Bayes model, we
calculated the probability of a document locating in the class
by using Bayes rules

A document

is a list of words:

The joint probability

which we assume
of each other words

when

. Thus

in
, i.e., is independent
. In reality, this assumption is

But we usually compute, in practice, by taking the log

is used as a weight to
Each conditional parameter
indicate the usefulness of an indicator to the class . The prior
log
is also used as a weight to indicate the relative frequency
of . The sum of the term weights and the log prior is used to
measure the amount of available evidence for the document that
is located in the class . We are going to pick the class that has the
largest summation.
We obtain
and
from the training data set

where
is the number of docs in class and
is the total
number of documents. The conditional probabilities can be
calculated as

where
refers to the number of words
in the training
documents from the class and
means the total number
of tokens in training document.
2) Optimization: In this section, we are interested in
the optimization problem of Nave Bayes Classier. Let
each document be represented by a word count vector
. We assume for each class , the probability
distribution of a document follows the multinomial distribution
with parameter :

The log likelihood is

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We also assume that the multinomial distribution assumes

conditional independence of feature dimensions
, given
the class . Given a training set
. Our task,
in this step, is to nd the best parameters
. Therefore, we translate the model as

Let there are

classes
probability of the class can be dened

. For a class, the

. According to the maximum-likelihood

estimation (MLE), the maximum of the joint (
the training set

Therefore,
write

) likelihood of

is a constrained optimization problem. We

is the number of classes and
. It is easy to solve it using

Lagrange multipliers [33] and arrives at

Therefore, we are looking for

expression:

that minimizes the following

The optimization value of the log likelihood loss form can

typically be solved by NewtonRaphson iterations (or by iterative reweighted least squares for logistic regression) [34], [35].
Recall that both Nave Bayes and Logistic Regression are
linear classiers. They both divide the documents
with a
hyperplane. But they differ from each other: Nave Bayes
optimizes a generative objective function, while Logistic
Regression optimizes a discriminative objective function. In
practice, logistic regression often has higher accuracy when
training data set is large and on the other hand Nave Bayes has
an advantage when the size of the training data set is small.
D. Vehicular Data Mining Cloud Service

and

The above results are intuitively explained as follows: they are

class frequency in the training data set and the word frequency of
each class.
3) Logistic Regression Model: Logistic regression model is
also used for both classifying and clustering [34]. As a generative
model, Nave Bayes can model the joint
, with the
assumption of independence on the words of . The Logistic
regression, a discriminative model, estimates
directly.
We also put an emphasis on the learning classiers
for a set of training data sets
. For a text
document, the vector
consists of transformed
word frequencies ,
from the training document. The
values
serve as class labels that encode the membership ( ) or nonmembership ( ) of the vector in the
category of . To map to real number, we calculate the inner
product between and the parameter vector

Specically, we calculated the conditional probability in

logistic link function form

As vehicular data clouds contain a variety of heterogeneous

data and information resources, effective data mining service
must be developed to quickly detect dangerous road situations,
issue early warning messages, and assist drivers to make informed decisions to prevent accidents [36]. Data mining services
can also be used to assess drivers behavior or performance of
vehicles to nd problems in advance. The core of any data mining
service is the data mining models [37], [38]. So far, few models
were developed and tested for mining vehicular data collected
from vehicular networks or data clouds.
Below is a specialized data mining service for car warranty
early-warning analysis. We applied the models that we developed in Section IV-C to design and develop the data mining
service. In vehicle manufacturing process, sometimes, some
quality issues can be hidden for a long time without being
identied. Due to a lack of events or signals to correlate several
discrete issues, potential problems may not be investigated at all.
To avoid accidents, it is important to develop new techniques that
reveal these hidden problems in advance. By using the two
modied data mining models (Naive Bayes Classier and
Logistic Regression Classier) to cluster and classify the real
car warranty and maintenance data we collected from a local
automobile company, we demonstrated how data mining cloud
service could be used to identify potential issues that could
become a problem later. This experiment assumes a new product
that is under development and has some potential but unknown
issues. As a result of applying the two data mining models, we
were able to acquire some preliminary results (see Fig. 5). We
found that the precision in column cross dropped dramatically.
The drop is associated with the s value which is 3. In other
words, the model found that there are three groups among all the

HE et al.: DEVELOPING VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES IN THE IoT ENVIRONMENT

Fig. 5. Clustering results for unknown warranty issues.

Fig. 6. Clusters of unknown warranty issues.

corpus of natural language text. We show the group distribution

in Fig. 6.
V. CHALLENGES AND DIRECTIONS

FOR

FUTURE WORK

IoT-based vehicular data clouds must be efcient, scalable,

secure, and reliable before they could be deployed at a large
scale. Existing algorithms and mechanisms are unsatisfactory to
meet all these requirements at the same time. Below is a
description of some of these challenges.
1) Scalability and technology integration: The effectiveness
of a vehicular cloud depends on its scalability to handle a
dynamically changing number of vehicles. In addition to
handling regular trafc, vehicular clouds must be able to
handle trafc spikes or sudden demands caused by special
events or situations, such as sport games or emergencies.
More development on optimization algorithms that coordinate virtual machines, storage space, and network bandwidth to balance server workload and improve computing
resource utilization on the vehicular clouds is needed [39].
As new devices and technologies are coming out each year,
developing effective IoT Middleware that supports integration of these new technologies and devices [40] with
existing in-vehicle technologies from automobile manufacturers will be a challenge.
2) Performance, reliability and quality of service: As vehicles are often on the move, the vehicular networking
and communication is often intermittent or unreliable.
More new mechanisms are needed to enhance the

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communication reliability with reduced trafc overhead.

For example, Chen et al. [41] developed a new transmission protocol to make the conventional Zigbee protocol
more reliable. Cross layer data synchronization mechanisms should also be designed to minimize the trafc
overhead between layers. Acceleration data compression
algorithms for resource-constrained sensors, actuators, and
other Internet-access devices need improvement to be able
to effectively and efciently compress a large amount of
raw data generated. Multiple processing units and support
in different cloud data centers are needed to minimize the
service response time, improve availability and stability of
the service, and increase cloud reliability and fault tolerance. Real-time evaluation mechanisms regarding the
performance, reliability, and service quality on vehicular
data clouds will have to be further developed.
3) Security and privacy: There are some security and privacy
concerns with vehicular data clouds due to a lack of
established infrastructure for authentication and authorization [39]. A low security level of vehicular data clouds is
unacceptable for vehicular services regarding transportation safety. For example, roadside attackers may maliciously send many fake requests to the parking cloud
service and reserve many parking spaces. They can also
send misleading parking availability information or wrong
location information to the parking cloud service to cause
chaos. Trust relationships are hard to be built in vehicular
clouds because of the large and dynamically changing
number of vehicles on the road. Balanced security measures are needed to enhance the security and trust of cloud
services without limiting the exibility of the system. In
addition, many drivers do not want their vehicle locations
to be tracked or monitored due to the worries about their
privacy. Reasonable efforts in technology [42], law, and
regulation are needed to secure the vehicular data clouds
and prevent unauthorized access to or disclosure of the
privacy data. For example, implementing security authentication in vehicular data clouds is required security
countermeasure.
4) Lack of global standards for device and service integration, security, privacy, architecture, and communications:
Global standards are essential to avoid conicts between
locally developed vehicular data clouds [27]. However, as
there are a number of stakeholders involved in vehicular
data clouds, and complex dependencies among these
stakeholders also exist, it is challenging to establish global
standards to lower the complexity and make vehicular data
clouds more compatible and cost effective. Further efforts
on standardization are needed to coordinate various efforts
and resources for implementing vehicular data clouds.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we present a novel modular and multilayered
vehicular data cloud platform based on cloud computing and IoT
technologies. We also discuss how cloud services could be
developed to make the vehicular data clouds useful. This study
makes contributions by proposing a novel software architecture

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for the vehicular data clouds in the IoT environment, which has
the capabilities to integrate numerous devices available within
vehicles and devices in the road infrastructure.
IoT-based vehicular data clouds are expected to be the backbone of future ITSs with the ultimate goal of making driving safer
and more enjoyable. However, research on integrating IoT with
the vehicular data clouds is still in its infancy and existing study
on this topic is highly insufcient. To make vehicular data clouds
useful, numerous services, such as road navigation, trafc
management, remote monitoring, urban surveillance, information and entertainment, and business intelligence [43][47], need
to be developed and deployed on vehicular data clouds. A
number of challenges such as security, privacy, scalability,
reliability, quality of service, and lack of global standards still
exist. Due to the complexity involved in implementing vehicular
clouds and integrating various devices and systems with vehicular clouds [48][51], a systematic approach and collaboration
among academia, the automobile companies, law enforcement,
government authorities, standardization groups, and cloud service providers are needed to address these challenges. Though
with many challenges, IoT and cloud computing provide
tremendous opportunities for technology innovation in the automobile industry [52], [53] and will serve as enabling infrastructures for developing vehicular data clouds.
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1595

Wu He received the B.S. degree in computer science

from DongHua University, Shanghai, China, in 1998,
and the Ph.D. degree in information science from the
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA, in
2006.
His research interests include enterprise applications, data mining, cyber security, and knowledge
management.

Gongjun Yan received the Ph.D. degree in computer

science from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA,
USA, in 2010.
Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Computer
Science with the University of Southern Indiana,
Evansville, IN, USA. He applied mathematics models
and computer simulations to analyze research problems in information security, vehicular ad hoc networks, and wireless communications.

Li Da Xu (M86SM11) received the M.S. degree in

information science and engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei,
China, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in systems
science and engineering from Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA, in 1986.
Dr. Xu serves as the Founding Chair of IFIP TC8
WG8.9 and the Founding Chair of the IEEE SMC
Society Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems.