Design and performance evaluation of an optimized peer-to-peer content replication scheme for vehicular networks

Abstract

Owing to the increasing research applied to wireless technologies, it is possible to envisage futuristic scenarios where vehicles will be equipped with long-range and point-to-point capable wireless interfaces. Besides, the availability of efficient content replication architectures and well-suited optimization schemes, allow to port actual peer-to-peer (p2p) frameworks to such scenarios. This paper introduces the design and the performance evaluation of an optimized p2p-based replication scheme, to exploit content delivery through a mobile vehicular network. This is obtained through a discrete-time dynamic system over which an optimization problem must be solved in real-time. Such a solution enables two different operations: i) to overcome bandwidth limitations in order to distribute information among vehicles (e.g., traffic or security bulletins and multimedia contents) in an efficient way; ii) to use the vehicular flow as a "virtual backbone" to deliver data to different spatial locations without the need of a fixed infrastructure. Simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, with respect to classic p2p distribution schemes directly ported over the vehicular network. © 2008 SIMULATION COUNCILS, INC.