Vehicles as Big Data Carriers: Road Map Space Reduction and Efficient Data Assignment

We advocate the use of a data shuttle service model to offload bulk transfers of delay-tolerant data from the Internet onto standard vehicles equipped with data storage capabilities. We first propose an embedding algorithm that computes an offloading overlay on top of the road infrastructure. The goal is to simplify the representation of the road infrastructure as raw maps are too complex to handle. In this overlay, each logical link maps multiple stretches of road from the underlying road infrastructure. We formulate then the data transfer assignment problem as a novel linear programming model that determines the most appropriate logical paths in the offloading overlay for a data transfer request. We evaluate our proposal using actual road traffic counts in France. Numerical results show that we can satisfy weekly aggregate requests in the petabyte range while achieving cumulative bandwidth above 10 Gbps with a market share of 20% and only one terabyte of storage per vehicle.