Deadline-constrained content distribution in vehicular delay tolerant networks

Content distribution in vehicular networks is essential to many emerging applications. The issues such as content distribution from road side units (RSUs) to vehicles or the cooperation between vehicles have drawn a lot of interests in the literature. However, little work is on packets distribution from content providers to RSUs and many related issues are still under-investigated. In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the distribution cost, which is defined as the number of packets that shall be dispatched to RSUs, for deadline-constrained content distribution in vehicular networks. The problem is first formulated as an integer programming problem, based on a link-coloring concept. Then, a heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity is proposed. The high efficiency of the proposed algorithm is extensively validated by the fact that it performs close to the optimal solution obtained by the CPLEX solver.