Deployment of vehicular edge clouds: Lessons and challenges

The notion of edge computing has gained much attraction in recent years as an enabling technology for smart city and internet of things applications. In this paper we report the system challenges and solutions encountered when designing and deploying the Macao Polytechnic Institute Smart City sensing system. A small fleet that serves as proof-of-concept for a country wide urban sensing system in Macao, S.A.R. We focus our attention on how a careful system design can ensure smooth operations and mitigate the natural tension between fleet owners and smart city operators. The first are keen to maximize the fleet operations and reduce the downtime, the later are interested in using the fleets to harvest high-quality and fine granularity sensor data. In designing the Macao Polytechnic Institute vehicular cloud we approached the design constraints and proposed system solutions to minimize the impact of the sensing platform on the fleet operations.