Contact lifespan and interest-based content dissemination in vehicular networks

The popularity of vehicular applications, enhancing road traffic and user comfort, has instigated commuters to use short-range connectivity, e.g. WiFi, to opportunistically share content based on their interests. Recent works have proposed content dissemination protocols aiming mainly to optimize throughput and fan-out delay, without considering content utility. This paper presents I-PICK, a cross-layer content dissemination protocol, aware simultaneously of heterogeneous user interests (application layer) and node connectivity lifespan (link layer) on vehicular networks. In order to maximize content utility, the protocol improves data propagation on the link layer taking as reference the duration of the nodes contact and user interests as decision criteria to the forward scheduling mechanism. Results from trace-driven and synthetic simulations show that I-PICK outperforms relevant protocols in the literature.