Smart cities are one of the most developed fields in research that has acquired a lot of innovations. With the electric vehicles, the advantages such as less fuel consumption, improved energy distribution, reduced CO2 emissions can be achieved. Internet of things (IoT) is the next broad field that has already acquired a lot of advancements. The IoT sensors have evolved so many applications in the field of smart cities. The concept of connected vehicle using IoT sensors can help a lot of applications such as Fleet management, Traffic management, urban logistics, car sharing system, bike sharing system and so on. The main challenges of E- mobility are the lack of infrastructure such as charging stations, technical malfunctions of batteries and so on.
Fortunately, the emergence of IoT has come up with solutions for these problems. Having the electric vehicle IoT enabled, helps in many services such as monitoring the vehicle throughout the journey – thereby ensuring safety. The Government of India is also pushing for a shift towards electric vehicles. The government has claimed that India will move to 70 per cent of all commercial cars, 30 per cent of private cars, 40 per cent of buses, and 80 per cent of two-wheeler (2W) and three-wheeler (3W), and has the vision of making the country electrically mobile.
The connected vehicle is achieved through the Internet of Things and cloud connectivity. This article further motivates to adopt the fog computing rather than the cloud to communicate with the other vehicles. This will result in reduced latency as the process happen at the nearby devices rather than the distant cloud servers. The fog based electric mobility service is represented by the number of fog nodes, which can be the intelligent Road Side Unit (RSU), base stations or even routers. Having the RSU intelligent will make the entire vehicular application efficient in terms of energy use.
Fog-based E-mobility System
The proposed system introduces a novel architecture for the E-mobility in smart cities by enabling IoT. With advent and growth in the IoT applications, the smart electric vehicles are expanded rapidly with set of sensors such as the GPS, accelerometer to find the location of the vehicles. The architecture for the fog-based monitoring and management of electric vehicles in smart cities is described in Figure 1. The main component of the smart city application is the smart vehicle with on board Unit, the Road Side Unit and the connectivity support.
The electric vehicle will need different sensors according to the type of vehicle such as the speed, battery monitoring and others to measure temperature, pressure etc.
The devices in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), such as the Road side unit, base station and switches could be used as fog nodes.
The connectivity between electric vehicles and fog nodes could be achieved by basic connectivity such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Infra-red – whereas the connection between fog nodes and cloud will be achieved through the internet wireless network is also required to access location information to communicate among other vehicles. Along with consuming electricity, automotive electric vehicles are likely to be consuming and generating a plenty of data. Data such as battery capacity, nearby charge station, cost for the charging, distance to be covered, route to reach the destination will be stored to assist the driver. Hence, processing of these data while utilizing fog can be effective in real time data transfers. The data transfers between the vehicles are relying on smart phones. Therefore, utilizing the infrastructures available in the smart city environment as fog nodes will fit the need for many E-mobility services.
Application Scenario
The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) aims to provide variety of applications in smart cities. It provides services effectively to traffic and speed management, travel time management and so on. One interesting application is the car sharing system or bike sharing system that is already in operation across many cities in India.
Every day, many people travel from one place to another are benefited using this car sharing system as their mode of transport. Adoption of electric vehicles rather than fuel vehicles in such applications will be cost effective, energy efficient and also safe in urban environment.
Considering the scenario of Fog based car sharing system, the base station could be even used as fog node. Figure 2 describes the Fog-based car sharing system. A smart phone application for car sharing system with facility to find nearby available vehicle is defined.
The adoption of fog computing and electric vehicles for car sharing system has many advantages. By carrying out the allocation of vehicles to passengers in the fog node reduces latency since it is very close to where the data is generated. For the allocation of vehicles and passengers, scheduling approaches can be utilised, which will result in energy efficient and improved performance.
Summary
This article has introduced the Fog based Computing architecture for the E-mobility oriented services and signified the importance of the Smart Cities by saving time and energy thereby ensuring the clean environment. The proposed architecture integrates the E-Mobility to Fog and IoT and utilizes even the Road Side Unit to act intelligently. Thus, it ensures the effective transportation among Smart vehicles.
Dr. S. Durairaj is a BOYSCAST Post Doctoral Fellow and currently serving as a Professor from the Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, in Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan Engineering College, Perambalur, Tamilnadu, India.
Dr. S. Padmavathi is working as a Professor in the Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India.
Ms. G. Jeyashree is a Full Time Research Scholar in the Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India.
