Consistency Control to Manage Dynamic Contents over Vehicular Communication Networks

To improve driving comfort and provide entertainment services, vehicular communication networks (VCNs) have appeared as an emerging solution, which consists of road-side units (RSUs) and on-board units (OBUs) to distribute multimedia contents. However, as most of OBUs always request the stored contents in the RSUs, how to update the contents in these RSUs when the original changes at its original servers has become an important issue to be dealt with. This paper proposes a novel method to resolve the above problem. Firstly, based on the characteristics of peers and geographical information, we decide which replica of which content in RSUs should be updated when its original changes. Secondly, by comparing the delivery cost of wired and wireless transmission, we decide whether the updated content should be delivered from a fixed peer or other mobile peers. Lastly, the detailed algorithm is presented and summarized.