  The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution and the development of smart
communities have resulted in increased demand for bandwidth due to the rise in
network traffic. Instead of investing in expensive communications
infrastructure, some researchers have proposed leveraging Vehicular Ad-Hoc
Networks (VANETs) as the data communications infrastructure. However VANETs are
not cheap since they require the deployment of expensive Road Side Units (RSU)s
across smart communities. In this research, we propose an infrastructure-less
system that opportunistically utilizes vehicles to serve as Local Community
Brokers (LCBs) that effectively substitute RSUs for managing communications
between smart devices and the cloud in support of smart community applications.
We propose an opportunistic algorithm that strives to select vehicles in order
to maximize the LCBs' service time. The proposed opportunistic algorithm
utilizes an ensemble of online selection algorithms by running all of them
together in passive mode and selecting the one that has performed the best in
recent history. We evaluate our proposed algorithm using a dataset comprising
real taxi traces from the city of Shanghai in China and compare our algorithm
against a baseline of 9 Threshold Based Online (TBO) algorithms. A number of
experiments are conducted and our results indicate that the proposed algorithm
achieves up to 87% more service time with up to 10% fewer vehicle selections
compared to the best-performing existing TBO online algorithm.
