IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO.
2, MAY 2014
Developing Vehicular Data Cloud
Services in the IoT Environment
Wu He, Gongjun Yan, and Li Da Xu, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—The 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 modified data
mining models for the vehicular data mining cloud service, a Naïve
Bayes model and a Logistic Regression model, are presented in
detail. Challenges and directions for future work are also provided.
Index Terms—Automobile service, cloud computing, internet of
things (IoT), intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), service-
oriented architecture (SOA).
I. INTRODUCTION
ODERN VEHICLES are increasingly equipped with a
M 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 capa-
bilities, and can communicate with other vehicles or exchange
information with the external environments over various proto-
cols, including HTTP, TCP/IP, SMTP, WAP, and Next Genera-
tion 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 traffic, conges-
tion, and vehicle safety. In the past few years, researchers have
proposed a few models that use cloud computing for implement-
ing 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 Identifier 10.1109/TII.2014.2299233
1551-3203 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1587
A cloud-based urban traffic control system was proposed to
optimize traffic control [4]. Based on a service-oriented archi-
tecture (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 traffic 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 benefits to numerous applica-
tion areas including health care, manufacturing, and transporta-
tion [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 traffic
control and management, car location tracking and monitoring,
road condition, car warranty, and maintenance information, can
be intelligently connected and made available to drivers, auto-
makers, 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 environ-
ment. Two modified data mining models for the vehicular data
mining cloud service, a Naïve Bayes model and a Logistic
Regression model, are presented in detail. Challenges and direc-
tions 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
1588
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 applica-
tions were developed by numerous vehicle manufacturers, gov-
ernment agencies, and industrial organizations. Initially, most
VANET applications were focused on improving drivers’ safety
and offered functions such as traffic monitoring and update,
emergency warning, and road assistance [11]. In recent years,
many nonsafety-related VANET applications, such as entertain-
ment 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 net-
works, various sensors, on-board devices in vehicles, and cloud
computing to create vehicular clouds. They suggest that vehicu-
lar clouds are technologically feasible and will have a significant
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 traffic administration,
service routing, information processing, vehicle warranty anal-
ysis and mining, etc. As cloud computing includes three distinct
services—platform 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 traffic 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 pro-
vides 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 net-
work. 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 partic-
ular, 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 identification (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, com-
munication, 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
vehicle’s existing location, monitor its movement, and predict its
future location.
By integrating with cloud computing, wireless sensor net-
work, 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 benefits, such as predicting increasing
road safety, reducing road congestion, managing traffic, and
recommending car maintenance or repair. Some preliminary
HE et al.: DEVELOPING VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES IN THE IoT ENVIRONMENT 1589

work of using IoT technologies to improve ITSs has been

conducted in recent years. For example, an intelligent informat-
ics 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 traffic
information from the external environments on an ongoing basis
and to monitor and manage road traffic 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 refrig-
erator trucks using IoT technologies. Fig. 1. Architecture for IoT-based vehicular data clouds.

III. PROPOSED VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD PLATFORM TABLE I

IN THE IOT ENVIRONMENT NOVEL SERVICES FOR IOT-BASED
VEHICULAR DATA CLOUDS

Fig. 1 shows the layered architecture of our proposed IoT-

based vehicular data cloud platform. By integrating various
devices such as sensors, actuators, controllers, GPS devices,
mobile phones, and other Internet access equipments, and em-
ploying networking technologies (wireless sensor network, cel-
lular 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 conven-
tional 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 traffic adminis- foundational support for the layers on the top. SOA will be
tration applications can be hosted on the conventional cloud. The applied to integrate different information and communication
temporary cloud is typically formed on demand and is composed services and connect in-vehicle and out-vehicle applications
of under-utilized computing, networking, and storage facilities seamlessly through the vehicular data clouds. SOA allows
of vehicles and is designed to expand the conventional cloud in vehicular application developers to organize, aggregate, and
order to increase the whole cloud’s computing, processing, and package applications into new business applications services.
storing capabilities. The temporary cloud supports a compound As a mature technology for enterprise application integration,
of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS and primarily hosts highly dynamic SOA provides guidelines to integrate heterogeneous web ser-
vehicular applications which may have issues running on the vices, applications, and different middleware systems. Middle-
conventional clouds [26]. For example, traffic-related applica- ware is used to hide the implementation details of underlining
tions and smart parking applications are suitable for the tempo- technologies and provides support for the integration of specific
rary cloud. The temporary cloud often needs to communicate applications deployed on the vehicular data cloud [24]. By
with the conventional clouds and there is a frequent exchange of leveraging the SOA-based and IoT-based vehicular data cloud
data and services between the two clouds [13]. Based on the platform, innovative services can be developed by car manu-
layered architecture in Fig. 1, heterogeneous IoT-related devices, facturers, government agencies, and third-party service provides.
network, community technologies, and cloud-based services on In this section, we propose two innovative vehicular data cloud
different layers can be integrated to exchange information, share services.
resources, and collaborate on the clouds.
The proposed IoT-based vehicular data cloud platform sup-
IV. VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES
ports three new cloud services as indicated in Table I [30].
In this proposed layered architecture, different layers have In this section, we are interested in introducing two vehicular
different purposes. In general, the layers on the bottom provide a data cloud services as examples of PAAS shown in Section III.
1590 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MAY 2014

Fig. 2. Software architecture for intelligent parking cloud service. 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 find available
parking space, an intelligent parking cloud service that collects
and analyzes geographic location information, parking availabil-
ity information, parking space reservation and order information,
traffic 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 Fig. 4. Parking cloud service.
reservation. If the parking spot is validated, a direction-related
guidance will be uploaded to the car for finding the reserved spot.
The infrared device, lights, and parking belt will work together to
B. Intelligent Parking Service Models
detect and prevent misparking. As shown in Fig. 3, the bluetooth
communication will be activated when the front wheel presses the In this section, the parking process has been modeled as a
belt-a. The tamper-resistant device (TRD) and belt-a in Fig. 3 will birth–death stochastic process. The parking revenue could be
validate reservation confirmation as necessary. We use an infra- predicted by using such a model. The birth and the death of
red device to validate whether the car is parked instead of using parking mean that a vehicle enters and exits a parking slot at time
the slot for a temporary purpose. If the parking slot is correctly , respectively. We were able to obtain the birth and death rate by
parked with cars, the light will show green color; otherwise, the using traffic detectors or other sensors [31]. We assume that there
light shows red color. These sensors connect to computer center is a huge number of parking slots and this number can be
to report the status of every parking slot on an ongoing basis. considered infinite for practical purposes. Let be the
We also designed an infrastructure to publish advertisement number of slots in occupied time . We write { } as
from the parking lot (see Fig. 4). There are wireless transceiver a birth and death process. Therefore, we can read for all > ,
towers in the parking lot and multiple transceivers (shown as to > and . The occupied slot at time is
) 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 informa-
tion and parking plan as business strategies for economical
benefits. As the wireless transmission range is limited, we have where is the birth rate and is the death rate. We note the
roadside transceivers to relay the parking information to remote probability of a car parking event that occurs in ( ) is
areas, as shown in Fig. 4. independent from the number of occupied parking slots at time .
HE et al.: DEVELOPING VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES IN THE IoT ENVIRONMENT 1591

If refers to the probability when the number of parking cars not always true but this assumption can greatly simplify the
at time is , we can derive the probability of problem and reach acceptable accuracy in real problems.
Therefore, we write

Based on , we can compute the mean value We made efforts to find the “best” class of Naïve Bayes
classification. The best class is typically the maximum of a
posteriori (MAP) class

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 But we usually compute, in practice, by taking the log
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 mainte-
nance data from both users and repair people.
Each conditional parameter is used as a weight to
The merged data are nature language text descriptions of
indicate the usefulness of an indicator to the class . The prior
maintenance. We place these texts into main files. To dig out
log is also used as a weight to indicate the relative frequency
auto-parts warranty information, we adopt nature language text
of . The sum of the term weights and the log prior is used to
mining technologies to these merged texts. As an emerging
measure the amount of available evidence for the document that
research area, currently limited studies have been published
is located in the class . We are going to pick the class that has the
regarding how data mining techniques could be applied to
largest summation.
vehicular networks or clouds. Few models were developed and
We obtain and from the training data set
tested for mining vehicular data collected from vehicular net-
works or data clouds. In this section, we present a modified Naïve
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. where is the number of docs in class and is the total
Given a document space where all docu- number of documents. The conditional probabilities can be
ments are represented in this space. We use for . A set of calculated as
fixed classes is marked as . We use for
and a training set of classi-
fied documents. Each labeled document . A
classifier is used to map documents to classes: . In this
section, we present an optimized model called Naïve Bayes where refers to the number of words in the training
Classifier. documents from the class and means the total number
1) Naïve Bayes Classifier: In the Naïve Bayes model, we of tokens in training document.
calculated the probability of a document locating in the class 2) Optimization: In this section, we are interested in
by using Bayes rules the optimization problem of Naïve Bayes Classifier. 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
A document is a list of words: . Thus with parameter :

The joint probability in The log likelihood is

which we assume , i.e., is independent
of each other words when . In reality, this assumption is
1592 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MAY 2014

We also assume that the multinomial distribution assumes Let there are classes . For a class, the
conditional independence of feature dimensions , given probability of the class can be defined
the class . Given a training set . Our task,
in this step, is to find the best parameters
. Therefore, we translate the model as
. According to the maximum-likelihood
estimation (MLE), the maximum of the joint ( ) likelihood of Therefore, we are looking for that minimizes the following
the training set expression:

The optimization value of the log likelihood loss form can

typically be solved by Newton–Raphson iterations (or by itera-
tive reweighted least squares for logistic regression) [34], [35].
Recall that both Naïve Bayes and Logistic Regression are
Therefore, is a constrained optimization problem. We linear classifiers. They both divide the documents with a
hyperplane. But they differ from each other: Naïve Bayes
write is the number of classes and
optimizes a generative objective function, while Logistic
Regression optimizes a discriminative objective function. In
. It is easy to solve it using practice, logistic regression often has higher accuracy when
Lagrange multipliers [33] and arrives at training data set is large and on the other hand Naïve 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, Naïve 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 classifiers
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 mem-
bership ( ) or nonmembership ( ) of the vector in the
category of . To map to real number, we calculate the inner
product between and the parameter vector
Specifically, 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 in-
formed decisions to prevent accidents [36]. Data mining services
can also be used to assess drivers’ behavior or performance of
vehicles to find 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 devel-
oped 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
identified. 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
modified data mining models (Naive Bayes Classifier and
Logistic Regression Classifier) 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 efficient, 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 traffic, vehicular clouds must be able to
handle traffic spikes or sudden demands caused by special
events or situations, such as sport games or emergencies.
More development on optimization algorithms that coor-
dinate virtual machines, storage space, and network band-
width 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 inte-
gration of these new technologies and devices [40] with
existing in-vehicle technologies from automobile manu-
facturers will be a challenge.
2) Performance, reliability and quality of service: As vehi-
cles are often on the move, the vehicular networking
and communication is often intermittent or unreliable.
More new mechanisms are needed to enhance the
1593
communication reliability with reduced traffic overhead.
For example, Chen et al. [41] developed a new transmis-
sion protocol to make the conventional Zigbee protocol
more reliable. Cross layer data synchronization mechan-
isms should also be designed to minimize the traffic
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 efficiently 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 toler-
ance. 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 authori-
zation [39]. A low security level of vehicular data clouds is
unacceptable for vehicular services regarding transporta-
tion safety. For example, roadside attackers may mali-
ciously 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 mea-
sures are needed to enhance the security and trust of cloud
services without limiting the flexibility 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 authen-
tication in vehicular data clouds is required security
countermeasure.
4) Lack of global standards for device and service integra-
tion, security, privacy, architecture, and communications:
Global standards are essential to avoid conflicts 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
1594
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 back-
bone 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 insufficient. To make vehicular data clouds
useful, numerous services, such as road navigation, traffic
management, remote monitoring, urban surveillance, informa-
tion 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 vehic-
ular clouds [48]–[51], a systematic approach and collaboration
among academia, the automobile companies, law enforcement,
government authorities, standardization groups, and cloud ser-
vice providers are needed to address these challenges. Though
with many challenges, IoT and cloud computing provide
tremendous opportunities for technology innovation in the auto-
mobile industry [52], [53] and will serve as enabling infrastruc-
tures for developing vehicular data clouds.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Iwai and M. Aoyama, “Automotive cloud service systems based on
service-oriented architecture and its evaluation,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf.
Cloud Comput., Washington, DC, USA, 2011, pp. 638–645.
[2] Y. Zhao, “Telematics: Safe and fun driving,” IEEE Intell. Syst., vol. 17,
no. 1, pp. 10–14, Jan./Feb. 2002.
[3] S. Bitam and A. Mellouk, “ITS-cloud: Cloud computing for intelli-
gent transportation system,” in Proc. IEEE Global Commun. Conf.,
Anaheim, CA, USA, 2012, pp. 2054–2059.
[4] P. Jaworski, T. Edwards, J. Moore, and K. Burnham, “Cloud computing
concept for intelligent transportation systems,” in Proc. 14th Int. IEEE Conf.
Intell. Transp. Syst., Washington, DC, USA, 2011, pp. 391–936.
[5] Z. Pang, L. Zheng, J. Tian, S. Kao-Walter, E. Dubrova, and Q. Chen,
“Design of a terminal solution for integration of in-home health care
devices and services towards the internet-of-things,” Enterprise Inf.
Syst., to be published, 2014.
[6] L. Xu, “Enterprise systems: State-of-the-art and future trends,” IEEE Trans.
Ind. Informat., vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 630–640, Nov. 2011.
[7] S. Li, L. Xu, and X. Wang, “Compressed sensing signal and data acquisition
in wireless sensor networks and internet of things,” IEEE Trans. Ind.
Informat., vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 2177–2186, Nov. 2013.
[8] Y. Li, M. Hou, H. Liu, and Y. Liu, “Towards a theoretical framework of
strategic decision, supporting capability and information sharing under the
context of internet of things,” Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4,
pp. 205–216, 2012.
[9] P. Papadimitratos, A. La Fortelle, K. Evenssen, R. Brignolo, and
S. Cosenza, “Vehicular communication systems: Enabling technologies,
applications, and future outlook on intelligent transportation,” IEEE Com-
mun. Mag., vol. 47, no. 11, pp. 84–95, Nov. 2009.
[10] H.Abid,L.T.T.Phuong,J.Wang,S. Lee, andS. Qaisar,“V-Cloud:Vehicular
cyber-physical systems and cloud computing,” in Proc. 4th Int. Symp.
Appl. Sci. Biomed. Commun. Technol., Barcelona, Spain, 2011, p. 165.
[11] S. Olariu, I. Khalil, and M. Abuelela, “Taking VANET to the clouds,” Int. J.
Pervasive Comput. Commun., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 7–21, 2011.
[12] Y. Leng and L. Zhao, “Novel design of intelligent internet-of-vehicles
management system based on cloud-computing and internet-of-things,”
in Proc. Int. Conf. Electron. Mech. Eng. Inf. Technol., Harbin, Heilongjiang,
China, 2011, vol. 6, pp. 3190–3193.
[13] R. Hussain, J. Son, H. Eun, S. Kim, and H. Oh, “Rethinking vehicular
communications: Merging VANET with cloud computing,” in Proc. IEEE
4th Int. Conf. Cloud Comput. Technol. Sci., Taipei, Taiwan, 2012,
pp. 606–609.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MAY 2014
[14] R. Mietzner, F. Leymann, and T. Unger, “Horizontal and vertical combi-
nation of multi-tenancy patterns in service-oriented application,” Enterprise
Inf. Syst., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 59–77, 2011.
[15] H. Panetto and J. Cecil, “Information systems for enterprise integration,
interoperability and networking: Theory and applications,” Enterprise Inf.
Syst., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–6, 2013.
[16] S. Hachani, L. Gzara, and H. Verjus, “A service-oriented approach for
flexible process support within enterprises: Application on PLM systems,”
Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 79–99, 2013.
[17] F. Tao, H. Guo, L. Zhang, and Y. Cheng, “Modelling of combinable
relationship-based composition service network and the theoretical proof
of its scale-free characteristics,” Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 6, no. 4,
pp. 373–404, 2012.
[18] D. Paulraj, S. Swamynathan, and M. Madhaiyan, “Process model-based
atomic service discovery and composition of composite semantic web
services using web ontology language for services (OWL-S),” Enterprise
Inf. Syst., vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 445–471, 2012.
[19] J. Wang, J. Cho, S. Lee, and T. Ma, “Real time services for future
cloud computing enabled vehicle networks,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Wireless
Commun. Signal Process., Nanjing, China, 2011, pp. 1–5.
[20] Y. Qin, D. Huang, and X. Zhang, “VehiCloud: Cloud computing
facilitating routing in vehicular networks,” in Proc. IEEE 11th Int.
Conf. Trust Secur. Privacy Comput. Commun., Liverpool, U.K., 2012,
pp. 1438–1445.
[21] H. Wang, W. He, and F. K. Wang, “Enterprise cloud service architectures,”
Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 445–454, 2012.
[22] Q. Li, Z. Y. Wang, W. H. Li, J. Li, C. Wang, and R. Y. Du, “Applications
integration in a hybrid cloud computing environment: Modeling and
platform,” Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 237–271, 2012.
[23] L. Ren, L. Zhang, F. Tao, X. Zhang, Y. L. Luo, and Y. Zhang,
“A methodology towards virtualization-based high performance simula-
tion platform supporting multidisciplinary design of complex products,”
Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 267–290, 2012.
[24] European Commission Information Society, Internet of Things in 2020:
A Roadmap for the Future [Online]. Available: www.iot-visitthefuture.eu.
[25] L. Atzori, A. Iera, and G. Morabito, “The internet of things: A survey,”
Comput. Netw., vol. 54, no. 15, pp. 2787–2805, 2010.
[26] C. Speed and D. Shingleton, “An internet of cars: Connecting the flow of
things to people, artefacts, environments and businesses,” in Proc. 6th ACM
Workshop Next Gener. Mobile Comput. Dynam. Personalised Travel
Plann. ACM, Ambleside, U.K., 2012, pp. 11–12.
[27] E. Qin, Y. Long, C. Zhang, and L. Huang, “Cloud computing and the
internet of things: Technology innovation in automobile service,” in Human
Interface and the Management of Information. Information and Interaction
for Health, Safety, Mobility and Complex Environments. Berlin, Germany:
Springer-Verlag, 2013, pp. 173–180.
[28] W. Lumpkins, “The internet of things meets cloud computing,” IEEE
Consum. Electron. Mag., vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 47–51, Apr. 2013.
[29] Y. Zhang, B. Chen, and X. Lu, “Intelligent monitoring system on refrigera-
tor trucks based on the internet of things,” Wireless Communications and
Applications. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 2012, pp. 201–206.
[30] S. Arif, S. Olariu, J. Wang, G. Yan, W. Yang, and I. Khalil, “Datacenter at
the airport: Reasoning about time-dependent parking lot occupancy,”
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst., vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 2067–2080,
Nov. 2012.
[31] G. Yan, W. Yang, D. B. Rawat, and S. Olariu, “SmartParking: A secure and
intelligent parking system,” IEEE Intell. Transp. Syst. Mag., vol. 3, no. 1,
pp. 18–30, Apr. 2011.
[32] D. Lowd and P. Domingos, “Naive Bayes models for probability estima-
tion,” in Proc. 22nd Int. Conf. Mach. Learn., Bonn, Germany: ACM, 2005,
pp. 529–536.
[33] R. T. Rockafellar, “Lagrange multipliers and optimality,” SIAM Rev.,
vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 183–238, 1993.
[34] G. Qian, Y. Wu, and Q. Shao, “A procedure for estimating the number of
clusters in logistic regression clustering,” J. Classification, vol. 26, no. 2,
pp. 183–199, 2009.
[35] T. J. Hastie and D. Pregibon, Generalized Linear Models. Belmont, CA,
USA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole, 1992.
[36] M. Faezipour, M. Nourani, A. Saeed, and S. Addepalli, “Progress and
challenges in intelligent vehicle area networks,” Commun. ACM, vol. 55,
no. 2, pp. 90–100, 2012.
[37] L. Bulysheva and A. Bulyshev, “Segmentation modeling algorithm: A
novel algorithm in data mining,” Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4,
pp. 263–271, 2012.
[38] L. Zeng, L. Li, L. Duan, K. Lu, Z. Shi, M. Wang, W. Wu, and P. Luo,
“Distributed data mining: A survey,” Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4,
pp. 403–409, 2012.
HE et al.: DEVELOPING VEHICULAR DATA CLOUD SERVICES IN THE IoT ENVIRONMENT
[39] G. Yan, D. Wen, S. Olariu, and M. C. Weigle, “Security challenges in
vehicular cloud computing,” IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst., vol. 14,
no. 1, pp. 284–294, Mar. 2013.
[40] S. Li, L. Xu, X. Wang, and J. Wang, “Integration of hybrid wireless
networks in cloud services oriented enterprise information systems,”
Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 165–187, 2012.
[41] S. K. Chen, T. Kao, C. T. Chan, C. N. Huang, C. Y. Chiang, C. Y. Lai et al.,
“A reliable transmission protocol for ZigBee-based wireless patient moni-
toring,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed., vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 6–16,
Jan. 2012.
[42] L. Li, “Technology designed to combat fakes in the global supply chain,”
Bus. Horizons, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 167–177, 2013.
[43] L. Duan and L. D. Xu, “Business intelligence for enterprise systems: A
survey,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat., vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 679–687, Aug. 2012.
[44] M. Gerla, “Vehicular cloud computing,” in Proc. 11th IEEE Annu.
Mediterranean Ad Hoc Netw. Workshop, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 2012,
pp. 152–155.
[45] S. Fang, L. Xu, H. Pei, Y. Liu, Z. Liu, Y. Zhu et al., “An integrated approach
to snowmelt flood forecasting in water resource management,” IEEE Trans.
Ind. Informat., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 548–558, Feb. 2013.
[46] L. Zeng, L. Li, and L. Duan, “Business intelligence in enterprise computing
environment,” Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 297–310, 2012.
[47] J. E. Ingvaldsen and J. A. Gulla, “Industrial application of semantic process
mining,” Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 139–163, 2012.
[48] Y. Xing, L. Li, and Z. Bi, “Operations research (OR) in service industries: A
comprehensive review,” Syst. Res. Behav. Sci., vol. 30, pp. 300–353, 2013.
[49] J. Wan and J. D. Jones, “Managing IT service management implementation
complexity: From the perspective of the Warfield version of systems
science,” Enterprise Inf. Syst., vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 490–522, 2011.
[50] S. Wang, L. Li, K. Wang, and J. D. Jones, “e-business systems integration:
A systems perspective,” Inf. Technol. Manag., vol. 13, no. 4,
pp. 233–249, 2012.
[51] L. D. Xu, “Introduction: Systems science in industrial sectors,” Syst. Res.
Behav. Sci., vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 211–213, 2013.
[52] G. Goggin, “Driving the internet: Mobile internets, cars, and the social,”
Future Internet, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 306–321, 2012.
[53] J. Gubbi, R. Buyya, S. Marusic, and M. Palaniswami, “Internet of things
(IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions,” Future
Gener. Comput. Syst., vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 1645–1660, 2013.
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 applica-
tions, 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 pro-
blems in information security, vehicular ad hoc net-
works, and wireless communications.
Li Da Xu (M’86–SM’11) received the M.S. degree in
information science and engineering from the Univer-
sity of Science and Technology of China, Hefei,
China, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in systems
science and engineering from Portland State Univer-
sity, 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 Informa-
tion Systems.