A Multi-Tier Vehicular Edge–Fog Framework for Real-Time Traffic Management in Smart Cities

The factors restricting the large-scale deployment of smart vehicular networks include application service placement/migration, mobility management, network congestion, and latency. Current vehicular networks are striving to optimize network performance through decentralized framework deployments. Specifically, the urban-level execution of current network deployments often fails to achieve the quality of service required by smart cities. To address these issues, we have proposed a vehicular edge–fog computing (VEFC)-enabled adaptive area-based traffic management (AABTM) architecture. Our design divides the urban area into multiple microzones for distributed control. These microzones are equipped with roadside units for real-time collection of vehicular information. We also propose (1) a vehicle mobility management (VMM) scheme to facilitate seamless service migration during vehicular movement; (2) a dynamic vehicular clustering (DVC) approach for the dynamic clustering of distributed network nodes to enhance service delivery; and (3) a dynamic microservice assignment (DMA) algorithm to ensure efficient resource-aware microservice placement/migration. We have evaluated the proposed schemes on different scales. The proposed schemes provide a significant improvement in vital network parameters. AABTM achieves reductions of 86.4% in latency, 53.3% in network consumption, 6.2% in energy usage, and 48.3% in execution cost, while DMA-clustering reduces network consumption by 59.2%, energy usage by 5%, and execution cost by 38.4% compared to traditional cloud-based urban traffic management frameworks. This research highlights the potential of utilizing distributed frameworks for real-time traffic management in next-generation smart vehicular networks.