A Distributed Fog-based Vehicular Navigation System for Efficient Transportation

The current Global Positioning System (GPS) has been heavily criticized by several parties (e.g., drivers and researchers) due to the delay in disseminating en-route data to drivers ahead of time. This issue resulted in poor rates of accuracy of data (i.e., traffic status), which eventually causes inefficient transportation. According to National Institute of Standards and Technology, the delay is caused mainly by the transmission medium. This paper presents a new distributed fog-based vehicles navigation system for efficient transportation. The proposed system uses closer-to-the-source data (a.k.a. drivers) nodes (i.e., fogs) as a new transmission medium for disseminate the road details to subscribed drivers who are connected to those nodes. A package delivery scenario has been implemented to show the impact of using fog nodes in reducing the navigation time and improving efficiency. Those fog nodes gather and broadcast real-time traffic data from/to drivers within the area they cover. In addition, a new road navigation simulator has been designed and developed to simulate the proposed system. The simulation results show superior performance of the new navigation system in terms of travel time and in-situ road data provisioning to drivers.