Unraveling Edge-based in-vehicle infotainment using the Smart Highway testbed

Abstract

With the advancements in SDN and NFV, both applications and network functions can be re-designed, and deployed at more appropriate locations. Thanks to the MEC platforms, cloud-alike service deployments are offered to the users/vehicles at closer proximity. However, MEC deployments are usually i) constrained in resources, ii) contain heterogeneous and distributed network and computing resources, and iii) cover narrower region that constrains service continuity due to the high mobility of vehicles. Thus, in this paper, we present our approach on collocating MEC platforms with roadside infrastructure (i.e., RSUs) in order to improve the QoS of infotainment services for vehicles on the smart highway. We tackle both challenges presented above by deploying MEC platforms along the highway, thereby having distributed control over each MEC host in the form of Kubernetes master nodes, and one powerful and yet centralized orchestrator in the cloud. Our approach is one of the earliest attempts to collocate MEC with the RSU, and to test the benefits of the smart application placement in a realistic vehicular environment.