First Experience with CarTorrent in a Real Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Testbed

Content sharing using cooperative peer-to-peer model has become increasingly more popular in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The small transmission window from a vehicle to an access point (AP), high mobility of vehicles, and intermittent and short-lived connectivity to an AP provide incentives for vehicles to cooperate with one another to obtain information from the Internet. These characteristics of VANETs naturally stipulate the use of cooperative peer-to-peer paradigm and motivate related content sharing application such as CarTorrent. Building upon previous research on SPAWN [6, 1], we have implemented CarTorrent and deployed it on a real VANET. We have run extensive field tests to affirm the feasibility of the peer-to-peer file sharing application tailored to VANET. To the best of our knowledge, the deployment of such a content sharing application on a real vehicular ad hoc testbed is the first of its kind.