Content Replication in Mobile Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a special type of mobile networks that has received significant attention from the academia and the industry in recent years. VANET applications are emerging as new opportunities for the automobile industry to provide advanced services to connected vehicles and their users. Most of those services, like information, safety, and entertainment systems, require a variety of content to be delivered to vehicles. An useful concept in this case is the one of content replication, which defines that content should be placed close to its potential clients. However, existing replicating solutions, as originally proposed for the Internet, are not suitable to VANETs because of their particular characteristics, such as highly dynamic topology, existence of push-based applications, information-centric nature, location- and time-dependent content, and intermittent connections. Therefore, we propose and evaluate in this work new techniques to replicate content in VANETs that rely on the vehicles´ origin-destination (O-D) points. The results reveal that our solutions were able to increase the content availability in two case studies, named city-wide and region-wide.