Cellular Content Download through a Vehicular Network: I2V Link Estimation

Cellular networks are facing serious traffic overload problems due to the high users traffic demands, emphasized by the important penetration of smart phones and their greedy applications. The originality of this paper is to investigate upon the use of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for offloading the cellular infrastructure. We provide an analytical study based on an optimization problem formulation where the aim is to select a maximum target set of flows to route through the Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET). Offloading decision considers the VANET link availability, channel load (using contention), vehicle to vehicle link quality and the maximum volume that could be offloaded from the road side unit to the vehicular nodes. Simulation results show that the data offloading fraction is closely tied to the data volume of the flows, to the channel load and to the path quality. Results show also that 100% of best effort data traffics could be offloaded in some specific scenarios.