Content delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are migrating from theory to practice mainly due to the great interest of manufacturers to provide new on-road services to their clients. As result, VANET applications are emerging to reality with the objective of making traffic safer, less congested, more informative, and enjoyable. To this end, afundamental requirement for such applications is the efficient delivery of content. Nevertheless, the particular characteristics of a VANET, such as highly dynamic topology, frequently density variations, and large-scale nature, make the task of delivering content easier said than done.Usually, two approaches have been used to deliver content in the traditional Internet: Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). However, several characteristics of VANETs and their applications suggest that pure CDN and P2P models, as originally conceived for the Internet, are not suitable for them. So far, it is unclear how VANETs can benefit from adopting CDN and P2P concepts. To address this problem, the main objective of this thesis is to investigate how CDN and P2P concepts can be applied to VANETs and to propose solutions thatvalidate the hypothesis that those concepts are helpful to vehicular applications. To achieve this objective, we first analyze the related studies to find out how the content delivery problem has been tackled in the literature. Based on this study, we define a hybrid model where concepts from both CDN and P2P are inherited and adapted to VANETs. In addition to the model proposal, we also define a framework to guide application designers to develop content delivery applications. Finally, we propose and evaluate two solutions, based on mobility characterization results, to demonstrate that our model is useful for the performance of VANET applications.