An Optimized Content Replication and Distribution Framework for Vehicular Networks

Future road vehicles are expected to support point-to-point and long-range wireless connectivity as a standard feature, allowing data transfers while moving. In this vein, it is possible to forecast and develop new communication paradigms, as well as new infrastructures to take advantage of peculiarities of vehicular networks. This article introduces an optimized framework, on the basis of peer-to-peer principles, to manage content replication and dissemination through a mobile vehicular network. This is obtained through a discrete-time dynamic system over which an optimization problem must be solved in real time. Such a solution enables two different operations: (a) to overcome bandwidth limitations for distributing information among vehicles (e.g., traffic or security bulletins and multimedia contents) in an efficient way; (b) to use the vehicular flow as a virtual backbone to deliver data to different spatial locations without the need of a fixed network infrastructure. Simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with respect to classic peer-to-peer distribution schemes directly "ported" over the vehicular network. A direct comparison with an infrastructure-oriented solution is also presented.