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ZTE Communications ›› 2016, Vol. 14 ›› Issue (3): 22-28.doi: DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2016.03.003

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Hybrid Content Distribution Framework for Large-Scale Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

HE Jianping and CAI Lin   

  1. (Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, BC, V8W 3P6, Canada
  • Received:2015-12-29 Online:2016-08-01 Published:2019-11-29
  • About author:HE Jianping (jphe@uvic.ca) is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Victoria, Canada. He received the PhD degree of control science and engineering in 2013, at Zhejiang University, China. He is a member of Networked Sensing and Control group (NESC). His research interests include the control and optimization of sensor networks and cyber-physical systems, the scheduling and optimization in VANETs and social networks, and the investment decision in financial market and electricity market.
    CAI Lin (cai@ece.uvic.ca) received her MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Since 2005, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria, Canada, where she is currently a professor. Her research interests span several areas in communications and networking, with a focus on network protocol and architecture design supporting emerging multimedia traffic over wireless, mobile, ad hoc, and sensor networks. She has been a recipient of the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Grants in 2010 and 2015, and of the best paper awards of IEEE ICC 2008 and IEEE WCNC 2011. She has served as a TPC symposium co-chair for IEEE Globecom'10 and Globecom’13, and associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, International Journal of Sensor Networks, and Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN).

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Abstract: Content distribution in large-scale vehicular ad hoc networks is difficult due to the scalability issue. A message may need to be carried by several vehicles till it reaches the destination. To select an appropriate next-hop carrier, the current carrier should exchange control messages with a large number of vehicles encountered, and thus the pure ad hoc solution is not scalable. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid-network solution. We first divide the area into regions, and select a hot spot in each region to install a road-side unit (RSU). RSUs can coordinate message exchanges between vehicles, and storage devices are used to temporarily hold a message waiting for the next-hop carrier. The RSUs and the vehicles traveling between them construct an overlay store-carry-and-forward content distribution network. Two types of vehicles exist, one with fixed mobility patterns such as buses, and the other with random patterns such as taxis. Considering one or both types of vehicles, utility-based optimization problems can be formulated to find the optimal routing solutions. Using the bus and taxi traces of Shanghai city, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the hybrid framework in terms of delivery delay, delivery ratio and overhead ratio.

Key words: content distribution, VANETs, utility-based routing, store-carry-and-forward