Performance analysis of a virtualization layer supporting P2P downloading of contents in VANETs

The VaNetLayer is a cluster-based approach to handle communications in vehicular ad-hoc networks, furnishing an abstraction of fixed geographical regions served by virtual nodes as a means to tackle the challenges raised by the mobility of the real nodes. Previous studies have shown that the VaNetLayer can be used to implement routing protocols that achieve good performance -in terms of packet delivery ratio, latencies and routing overhead- in canonical scenarios involving communications between pairs of vehicles chosen at random. In this paper, we assess the performance of the VaNetLayer in more complex scenarios of peer-to-peer downloading and dissemination of contents, which has long been advocated as one of the foreseeable applications of VANETs.