Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles, such as connected and autonomous vehicles, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, based on the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this goal, this article first examines the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, the system architecture and use cases of the VaaS paradigm are comprehensively discussed. At last, the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy, are identified. It is expected that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for smart cities.