Popularity-based probabilistic data deployment in vehicular ad-hoc networks

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), moving vehicles carry data and exchange it as they pass each other. Storage in a vehicle, in other words, the amount of saved data is limited resource in general. Therefore, attributes of data that should be carried by vehicles is an important factor in order to efficiently disseminate desired data. In this paper, we focus on popularity of data and propose probabilistic data deployment based on its popularity. The proposed method deploys the data to vehicles randomly according to its relative popularity. By this simple operation, data can be deployed inside a vehicular network and as a result, data with high popularity tends to have larger number of copies inside the network than lower-popularity data. Performance evaluation shows that our deployment can work well in limited storage.