THEME ARTICLE: CONNECTED AND AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

CFC-ITS: Context-Aware
Fog Computing for
Intelligent Transportation
Systems
Quang Tran Minh This paper proposes a novel context-aware fog computing
Ho Chi Minh City University
framework for intelligent transportation systems (ITS)
of Technology,
VNU-HCM called CFC-ITS. This scheme consists of multiple
Eiji Kamioka intelligent tiers: Internet of Things tier, fog service tier, and
Shibaura Institute of global cloud service tier supporting edge analytics for ITS
Technology
services in a connected car environment. Each tier on the
Shigeki Yamada
National Institute of fog senses different contexts like location, time, available
Informatics resources, and estimated response time for efficiently
processing tasks to provide delay-sensitive services while
optimizing virtualized resources. A preliminary prototype
and a testbed for this study were built to validate the
robustness of the proposed approach.

With the advances of automobile and mobile network technologies, Internet-connected vehicles
(ICVs) have been developed, for which various types of data are collected and analyzed to provide
advanced services for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). These services, such as on-board
entertainment, on-site maintenance, driving assistance, traffic and safety information, routing
recommendation, traffic light optimization, and more, are commonly delay sensitive. ICVs frequently
sense the environment and transmit a large amount of data to cloud-based datacenters (DCs) for
processing. Consequently, network congestion might occur, leading to large latency that violates
time-sensitive requirements of the aforementioned services.
ITS data and services are commonly consumed by local users who are close to data sources.
Meanwhile, cloud computing is basically data-centric systems where computation and storage are

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centralized at DCs. While this scheme is still robust for applications requiring large computational
resources and historical data, it is not suitable for delay-sensitive ITS services. In order to effectively
mitigate the latency, computation and storage resources should be moved closer to the data sources and
sinks (users/clients). Thanks to virtualization technologies, communication devices such as access
points, base stations, and routers at the network edge in the proximity of Internet of Things (IoT)
devices can serve as virtualized resources for storage, communications, and computing. Fog
computing has been introduced to accelerate this approach, providing necessary links in the cloud-to-
thing continuum in the IoT paradigm.1
Although the benefit of fog computing, specifically in ITS, is clear and the basic ideas of this
computing paradigm have been well stated in various research,2,3 there is still a lack of systematical
approaches on context-aware fog computing for optimizing service placement on edge-based
resources. This paper proposes a novel context-aware fog computing framework for ITS, called CFC-
ITS, which provides multiple intelligent tiers on the fog to support ITS services and can feasibly be
extended to any IoT service or smart city application.
The main contributions of this work are summarized as follows.

We systematically model a fog computing scheme consisting of multiple intelligent tiers:

IoT, fog service, and global cloud service tiers for IoT services.

We propose a novel context-aware service decentralization mechanism on the fog where real
ITS services are thoroughly analyzed.

The effectiveness of the CFC-ITS, in terms of latency, energy, and cost reduction, is
thoroughly evaluated considering real ITS applications in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).
Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach in maximizing
IoT potential.

REVIEW OF FOG COMPUTING IN IOT AND ITS

Most of the existing IoT-related works assume the availability of centralized DCs on the cloud. Gubbi
et al. address necessary components of a cloud-centric IoT architecture where a federation between
private and public clouds to efficiently handle sensing data is proposed.4 However, this approach could
not satisfy time-sensitive services since global services are mainly computed on the cloud and
transmitted over the Internet. Bertier et al. propose a locality-based utility computing operating system
to overcome this issue.5 Here, computing utilities are distributed over the network backbones (local
servers at routers) to provide redundant computing resources. This study is similar to our work by
bringing resources close to the network edge and IoT devices, instead of building bigger DCs and
over-sized networks. Unfortunately, it had not utilized contextual information like location and
expected response time to improve its effectiveness.
Deploying miniclouds at the network edge to handle IoT data and services has led to much research.6
In this approach, IoT data can be quickly processed, mitigating network load and latency.
Nevertheless, this local computing scheme could not satisfy global services where a large amount of
historical data and computing resources is required. Fog computing, coined by CISCO,1 is a potential
approach to overcome this dilemma. It is a highly virtualized architecture that provides computing,
storage, and networking resources between IoT devices and cloud-based DCs.7,8 Byers proposes
architectural imperatives for fog computing, analyzing use cases, requirements, and techniques for
fog-enabled IoT networks.8 According to its advantages, fog computing has been widely studied to
provide sustainable smart city services,9 including ITS applications.2,3,10,11
Sookhak et al. and Xiao and Zhu present a visionary concept on fog vehicle computing, where
vehicles are utilized to augment the computing and storage power of fogs, providing on-demand ITS
services.2,10 They also discuss remaining challenges such as service provision, privacy, security, and
task scheduling on the fogs. However, these studies have not discussed the context-aware service
provision, one of the fog computing advantages. Kang et al. propose a fog-based privacy-preserved
pseudonym scheme where the pseudonym management is shifted to the fog landscape to utilize
contextual information such as location and number of vehicles at hotspots for making decisions.11

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Darwish and Bakar’s work is close to our current work, where a multitier fog computing architecture is
proposed to utilize contextual information and virtualized resources for efficiently processing big data,
providing ITS time-sensitive services.3 However, our work is different from this study as follows.

(i) A novel context-aware multitier intelligent framework is proposed to optimize service

placement in accordance with context ranging from user perspectives like service response
time to network condition like topology and nodes’ resource availability.
(ii) The proposed scheme is engaged with ITS services in ICV environment to show its
potential.
(iii) Evaluations and a prototype for real ITS implementation, which are missed in the
counterpart research, have been thoroughly analyzed to confirm the robustness of the
proposed approach.

CFC-ITS DESIGN
The current communication infrastructures have not been designed for specific ITS applications, while
they cannot be drastically redesigned. The main designed objectives in this work are to enable data
collection, transmission, integration, and analytics to be instantiated at the right locations, minimizing
the response time while maximizing the utilization of fog’s resources. To that end, first, the main
principles of ITS services are analyzed, and second, a context-aware multitier architecture is devised to
realize the designed principles as follows.

Decentralization. The whole system is geographically partitioned into autonomy regions,

and each one is managed by a fog node. Fog nodes are hierarchically organized to mitigate
global communications, lessen the effect of poor connections, and maximize virtualized
resource utilization.

Localization. Computing resources are distributed across regions close to data sources, so
the data can be processed locally without invoking many parts of the system. This principle
allows utilizing useful location-based context and mitigating latency, energy consumption,
and cost.

To satisfy these principles, the CFC-ITS framework has been proposed with three intelligent tiers
presented in Figure 1 and described as follows.

The IoT tier manages distributed services and data generated by things such as on-vehicle
sensors and mobile devices wirelessly connected via ad hoc modes or even connecting to the
Internet via mobile networks. These objects could embed with lightweight fog computing
functionalities, named L0 fog nodes, for data sampling and network handing over to
communicate with higher tiers with regard to ICVs’ locations.

The fog service tier provides services computed on the fog landscape consisting of different
fog levels on the thing-to-cloud continuum. The number of fog levels can be flexibly
expended with regard to application domains and deployment scopes. The CFC-ITS consists
of three main fog levels to efficiently utilize useful context for resource optimization. L1 fog
node is deployed at each intersection for traffic light optimization, reporting summarized
data to higher level fog nodes; L2 fog node is deployed at each district to manage multiple
traffic lights and monitor traffic condition on the district; and L3 fog node is installed on a
region (multiple districts) to manage and analyze regional data. Communications for context
exchanging between multilevel fog nodes are presented in the next section.

Global cloud service tier provides global services computed at DCs on the cloud using a
large amount of historical data. Routing recommendation in accordance with the whole city
traffic condition estimated from real-time and historical data is one of the global services in
the CFC-ITS.

Context-Aware Service Provision

Table 1 summarizes context-aware service provision at different tiers in CFC-ITS. Instead of
deploying every service on DCs as in cloud-only models, services are properly placed on different fog

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Figure 1. The CFC-ITS processes Internet-connected vehicle (ICV) data for traffic state estimation and
traffic light optimization.

levels based on available resources and related context. For example, simple yet useful context such as
location, velocity, and vehicle type are dynamically sampled by ICVs (L0 fog nodes) and reported to
the cloud and the traffic light control units (L1 fog nodes) at intersections. The communication also
means hand over from the mobile network to Wi-Fi when ICVs reach L1 nodes to save communication
cost. Services at traffic light control units optimize the associated traffic lights using local data and
instructions from its parent (L2) fog node. Services at L2 and L3 fog nodes include data analytics for
synchronizing multiple traffic lights in a district or a region, respectively, or issuing wide-area routing
recommendations. Cloud services include traffic estimation, global routing, training large models
leveraging advanced machine-learning methods, and historical data.
As presented, each CFC-ITS tier provides appropriate services in accordance with service types,
available resources, and the capabilities to collect and act appropriately with the context of fog nodes.
For instance, traffic data are properly sensed at ICVs (L0 nodes); traffic light control is processed at L1
nodes where actuating services are deployed; and traffic analytics is performed at different levels (from
fog to cloud), leveraging different types of summarized and historical data. This natural characteristic
of service provision helps reduce latency significantly while optimizing edge-based virtualized
resources.

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Table 1. Multilevel context-aware service provision.

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In addition, analytics can be assigned to “guest” fog nodes (not original/default ones) on different
levels of the fog landscape to optimize resources. We summarize our simple yet effective service
placement mechanism, in terms of maximizing fog resource utilization while satisfying the required
response time, in the following section.

Optimizing Service Placement on Fog Landscape

This section presents an effective method for optimizing service placement on the CFC-ITS’s fog
landscape to maximize virtualized resource utilization.
Problem. Given a set of applications/services A1 ,A2 ; . . . ; Am . Each application Ak is constrained
with a deadline DAk and is composed of independent tasks (executed simultaneously)
Ak ¼ ft 1 ; t 1 ; . . . ; t q g. Let J ¼ [m
i¼1 Ak ¼ ft 1 ; t 2 ; . . . ; t N g be the set of n tasks from all m
applications to be deployed. These tasks will be deployed on the fog and cloud that satisfy the
following two criteria.
C1: No application misses its deadline as described in the following equation, where RAk is the
response time of Ak :

RAk  DAk 8Ak : (1)

C2: The number of tasks deployed on the fog landscape is maximized.

Commonly, tasks are deployed at the original fog node that hosts the service. For example, tasks
composing the traffic light control service at intersection P will be deployed at an L1 fog node
at P, named F1 . However, if the available resources on F1 are not adequate for executing those
tasks upon the response-time constraint (traffic light control must be issued within 1 s), the tasks
can be migrated to a neighbor L1, to higher level nodes (L2, L3), or even to the cloud for
execution. Note that any task placement must satisfy the two criteria C1 and C2 mentioned
above.
Given a task t i originated at node F, this node will determine to place t i on one of four places for
execution as follows: on F if its resources are adequate; on a child node f that satisfies the resource
requirement; on its neighbor or its parent node N (details of task management and execution are
delegated to N); or on the cloud R.
Let xi f ; xi F ; xi N ; xi R 2 f0; 1g be binary variables denoting either t i is deployed on fðxi f ¼ 1Þ,
F ðxi F ¼ 1Þ, Nðxi N ¼ 1Þ, or Rðxi R ¼ 1Þ), respectively. Each task is deployed once and our
purpose is to maximize the number of tasks placed on fog landscape; the objective function is
formed as

n 
X  X
max xfi þ xFi þ xN  xpi ¼ 1: (2)
i 
i¼1 p2ff; F; N g

Resolving this objective function provides an optimal placement plan. This plan also satisfies the
constraint in (1); every application is completed before its deadline under the fog-based resource
availability. In this work, the resources required by a task are computation (CPU), storage
(memory), and communication capacity. Examples of evaluating computational resource
constraints and estimating application response time are presented as follows.
Accomplishing a task t i requires four steps: task submission, deployment, execution, and result return.
Therefore, the response time rti of the task is calculated as

rti ¼ wti þ mti þ dti (3)

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where

wti deployment time when necessary resources are prepared;

mti execution (makespan) time when the task actually utilizes resources for execution
dti communication time for exchanging data and results
between the original node and the deployment nodes.

These parameters are estimated given the task’s length

In this work, the resources
(instructions), the memory required, and the available resources required by a task are
such as CPU capability, storage available at fog nodes, network
topology, and its condition (bandwidth, latency). Therefore, the computation (CPU), storage
optimal model in (2) is resolved.
(memory), and
communication capacity.
EVALUATION AND PROTOTYPE
This section presents evaluations and a preliminary prototype of the
proposed approach to validate its feasibility and effectiveness.

Evaluation With ITS Applications

In order to verify CFC-ITS in real ITS applications, we partition HCMC into regions. At each
region, an L3 fog node is deployed to handle regional data and services (estimating regional
traffic conditions). Each L3 node manages several L1 nodes deployed at intersections for traffic
light control. L3 node also maintains connections to its regional neighbors and to the cloud.
Similarly, each L1 node maintains connections to its neighbors, to L0 nodes on ICVs, and to the
cloud.
A testbed emulating CFC-ITS has been established with a configuration described in Table 2.
We use two physical machines with Intel Corei7-4790 @3.60 GHz CPU, 4 GB memory running
on Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit) to emulate fog nodes. Concretely, we deploy on one machine an L3
node (denoted as F) that manages three L1 nodes (denoted as f0 , f1 , and f2 ), each of which is
emulated by a virtual machine. The other physical machine is used to emulate the neighbor L3
node (N). The L3 nodes connect to a DC (cloud, denoted as R) at the HCMC University of
Technology high-performance computing center (HCMUT HPCC). The DC is deployed with two
Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 @2.15 GHz  24 CPUs and 128 GB memory.
Two representative ITS applications, namely, the traffic light control and the traffic state estimation,
are selected for evaluation.

Table 2. ITS testbed configuration.

Delay (s) CPU RAM Power consumption
Node
from F (MIPS) (MB) (W, max, and idle)
F 0 100 2103 50 10
f0 0.02 3 16 10 2

f1 0.02 3 16 10 2
f2 0.02 3 16 10 2

N 0.5 100 2  103 50 10

R 2 684  103 128  103 120 50

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Table 3. Effectiveness of CFC-ITS compared to the cloud-only approach in real ITS applications.
Number of {CFC-ITS j Cloud}
applications MR (%) Energy (J) Cost ($)

A1 ¼ 3, A2 ¼ 10 {0 j 23} {430 j 622} {0 j 169e–6}

A1 ¼ 6, A2 ¼ 20 {0 j 23} {456 j 2074} {0 j 563e–6}

A1 ¼ 12, A2 ¼ 50 {0 j 19} {600 j 3318} {0 j 900e–6}

Traffic light control (A1). Given a traffic light currently at the beginning of its color phase (a
sequence of green, red, and yellow), set the duration of each light for the next phase
appropriately with the traffic condition.

Traffic state estimation (A2). Given a set of GPS data from ICVs on a road segment, estimate
the average velocity and density of the traffic flow.

Each application is composed of a single task, namely, A1 ¼ ft 1 g, and A2 ¼ ft 2 g. However, many

instances of an application can run concurrently on the same fog node. For example, several A2
instances are involved to estimate condition of multiple road segments in the region covered by F.
Each task is presented by a tuple of {deployment time (ms), size (MI), required memory (MB), expected
deadline (s)} as follows.

t 1 {0 ms, 0.02 MI, 0.16 MB, 1 s}

t 2 {8 ms, 6 MI, 3 MB, 10 s}.

We have solved the optimization problem of service placement on fog landscapes for these real ITS
services. The resulting task placement plan was then applied to the given network topology for
evaluation. Table 3 shows the effectiveness of CFC-ITS compared to the cloud-only counterpart in all
three factors: deadline missing rate (MR), energy consumption, and cost. The MR in the CFC-ITS is
0%, while it is around 20% in the cloud approach due to communication latencies. Importantly, the
cloud approach cannot provide expected traffic light control services as all of the A1 instances miss the
desired deadline (1 s).
Table 3 also shows that when more tasks are deployed on the cloud, energy is exponentially consumed
as DCs must wait for task arrivals that are delayed due to upward latencies. The last row reveals that
the energy consumption in CFC-ITS and the cloud approach is significantly different: 600 (J) and 3318
(J), respectively. The last column shows that the cost for renting computing services on the cloud is
relevant, while CFC-ITS costs $0 as available edge-based resources are utilized. Note that the energy
consumption and the cloud-based service cost are estimated using the models proposed in previous
works.12-14
The network topology in this testbed can be implemented for ITS applications in HCMC. On average,
there are 150 main intersections and 150 road segments in a district. This implies a deployment of 150
L1 (fi ) nodes and 1 L2 (F) node connecting to the cloud (or L3 node) for each district. In this
environment, every A1 or A2 instance can be executed at the fog without invoking the cloud while
satisfying the desired deadlines. Concretely, each A1 instance is executed at the corresponding L1
node within its deadline (1 s). Meanwhile, all 150 A2 instances are processed at the corresponding L2
node. This analysis shows that 100% of ITS services are successfully processed on the fog, saving the
cloud resources.

Preliminary Prototype for Real Implementation

A prototype for real implementation of CFC-ITS has been successfully developed with
lightweight fog nodes enabling edge analytics as depicted in Figure 2. L1 nodes are

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Figure 2. A prototype of the CFC-ITS. HCMUT HPCC: Ho Chi Minh City University of
Technology high-performance computing center.

implemented using Raspberry Pi kits embedded with local data processing for traffic light
control. Nvidia Jetson kits with powerful storage, communication, and computational resources
that support machine-learning algorithms for analyzing large data are used to implement L2 and
L3 nodes. Fog nodes communicate with each other via LoRa while communicating with the
cloud via the Internet. This prototype confirms the feasibility of developing CFC-ITS while
leveraging off-the-shelf technologies. The proposed approach is almost ready for real-world
implementation to enhance ITS and smart cities.

DISCUSSION
As confirmed, the proposed CFC-ITS is effective in optimizing IoT services, specifically in ITS
applications. However, these results show preliminary achievements. To make the proposed scheme
more robust, we plan to address the following issues.

1. Handling mobility. In IoT/ICV environment, things move frequently while connectivity

might be intermittent. This leads to frequent changes in fog’s topologies. Context occurred
upon such changes should be quickly updated for efficient task placements and resource
provisions. We plan to leverage work on mobility management to develop such
mechanisms.
2. Load balancing. Our current solution is greedy, so tasks are deployed on fog nodes in a
convenient way for implementation simplicity. This might lead to network imbalance
affecting the system’s effectiveness and lifetime. We will investigate load balancing
mechanisms to optimize the usage of virtualized resources locally and globally.
3. Task distribution. In this work, task distribution is handled by fog nodes that originally host
the services. Such control nodes can obtain local information of their subnetworks rather
than examining a global view of the whole network; hence, global optimization is not
achieved. SDN/Openflow15 approaches can help to achieve global optimization by
collecting the whole network statistics from SDN controllers.

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CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a novel multitier context-aware fog computing framework for ITS. The proposed
approach allows efficient decentralization of ICV data and services at different levels of intelligence
and sophistication in the fog computing paradigm. The proposed CFC-ITS not only provides delay-
sensitive services but also optimizes edge-based virtualized resources, significantly saving operational
costs compared to the cloud approach.
The prototype and evaluations reveal the robustness of CFC-ITS in real ITS applications. We are
planning to improve the openness and scalability of the proposed framework by applying SDN for a
flexible resource provision in the fog. This improvement can be applied to other smart city services.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology
Development (NAFOSTED) under Grant 102.01-2016.28.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Quang Tran Minh is a Lecturer with the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering,
Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam, and a Visiting Professor with the Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo,
Japan. His research interests include mobile and ubiquitous computing, Internet of
Things, network design and traffic analysis, disaster recovery systems, data mining, and
intelligent transportation systems. He received the Ph.D. degree in functional control
systems from the Shibaura Institute of Technology. He is a Member of IEEE. Contact him
at quangtran@hcmut.edu.vn.

Eiji Kamioka is a Professor, Deputy President, and Councilor with the Shibaura Institute
of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. His current research focuses on user-friendly information
and communication systems, encompassing mobile multimedia communications,
ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, ergonomics, and biological informatics. He
received the B.S., M.S., and D.S. degrees in physics from Aoyama Gakuin University,
Tokyo, Japan. Contact him at kamioka@shibaura-it.ac.jp.

Shigeki Yamada is currently a Professor Emeritus with the National Institute of

Informatics, Tokyo, Japan. His current research interests include future network
architectures, optical backbone networks, and mobile/wireless networks. He received the
Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, and
was involved in the development and deployment of Japanese Research and Education
Network SINET from 2006 to 2018. He is a Life Member of Information Processing
Society of Japan. Contact him at shigeki@nii.ac.jp.

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