Terahertz Empowered Vehicular Fog Computing: Opportunities, Feasibility, and Enhancements

The soaring number of connected vehicles poses a challenge for processing the vast amount of onboard data. Local processing is hindered by scarce onboard resources, and cloud uploading is undesirable due to high latency. To address the last-mile network connection issue, vehicular fog computing (VFC) has been proposed, where roadside infrastructures and specific vehicles installed with computing and communication resources could act as fog nodes to provide one-hop-direct services to surrounding vehicles. However, traditional narrowband vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies, incapable of supporting bandwidth-intensive applications while transmitting a large amount of uplink data over 5G cellular networks, may lead to network congestion or overwhelm. Terahertz (THz) bands, spanning the frequencies between 0.1 THz and 10 THz, offer a prospective potential to meet high traffic demands with abundant bandwidth. By integrating THz systems into fog nodes, we envisage a novel architecture - THz-empowered VFC - to gain large quantities of new bandwidth and achieve ultrahigh data rate communication. With the exploration of real-world vehicular trajectories and the implementation of a THz communication testbed, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture are verified.