Cloud-fog-dew architecture for refined driving assistance: The complete service computing ecosystem

Mapping services like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapbox etc. have been assisting the vehicle drivers for real-time traffic, shortest routes, locations and road topologies since several years, and these services are evolving unceasingly. Road accidents is a prominent cause of deaths in India and so does the road conditions. State of art driving assistance systems guide the drivers for sharp turns and road intersections but they lack in providing the fine grained assistance like potholes, speed breakers, sudden inclinations, and declinations on the road surface. The foremost hurdles for such highly sensitive systems are latency requirements, affordability, and high availability. With cloud computing, we can have high availability and affordability but it may not offer quick response due to its considerable round trip time. Fog computing gives huge advantage on latency side, geo-distribution, mobility, and affordability but high availability (fault-tolerance) cannot be always guaranteed due to its substantial geo-distribution. Moreover, end nodes, in both the cases acts purely as clients. With dew computing, we propose to allocate computing tasks on end devices and make them service providers instead of service consumers. The projected approach is heavily based on peer-to-peer communication which would be complementary in nature with cloud and fog. In this article, we explain how a driver can experience a fine-grained driving assistance if we intertwine all the three computing paradigms together. As per the knowledge of authors, this is the first ever proposal till date which entangles all three computing paradigms (Cloud, Fog and Dew) together.

I. Prologue

Road conditions, especially in India, are often varying and irregular. State of the road in the morning time may change in the afternoon and one in the afternoon cannot be assured to be the same in the evening. Reasons being, laying water pipelines, installing electricity poles, traffic signals, telephone lines and other maintenance activities. Nature can be the cause too. Heavy rains, lightning strike, overflowed river water, overheat can affect the road surface severely. Sometimes roads/ bridges are too worn-out to deform or collapse overnight [1]. Also, more than 40% of overall roads in India don't have street lamps for night vision. Even in cities, due to poor maintenance of streetlights, roads are not always guaranteed to be lightened. Unnoticed or unknown speed breakers or potholes, many times, lead to accidents. Uneven road surfaces like sudden inclinations or declinations are causes for many accidents too.