Multi-Layer Performance Evaluation of a Content Delivery Framework for Urban Vehicular Networks

In the last decade wireless communications significantly improved, being widely used in various areas such as health, education, industry and research. Recently, the automobile industry is adopting wireless technologies in order to improve the services offered, such as safety, route planning and infotainment. In particular, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are being promoted to improve safety and provide content delivery on the road. In this paper we provide a performance evaluation to assess the viability of a content delivery framework for VANETs. In our experiments we vary several parameters, such as vehicular density, vehicular speed, and content demand rate under different environment conditions. We evaluate, from a multi-layer perspective, the impact they have on metrics such as delivery latency, throughput, and packet loss; in particular, we evaluate user satisfaction through the latency perceived at the application layer, and the network performance via the packet loss. Results show that the overall performance is improved when speed and vehicular density are relatively high compared to typical urban traffic patterns.