Leveraging In-Network Caching in Vehicular Network for Content Distribution

Information-Centric Networking advocates ubiquitous in-network caching to enhance content distribution. Nonsafety application in vehicular communications is emerging beyond the initial safety application. However, content distribution based on TCP/IP Internet service in vehicular networks suffers from typical issue of low delivery ratio in urban environments, where high buildings block or attenuate the radio propagation as well as short radio coverage range. In order to solve this issue to deliver proximity marketing files, in this paper we propose in-network caching scheme in vehicular networks in accordance with traffic features, in which every vehicle is treated as either a subscriber to request a file or as a cache node to supply other nodes so as to accelerate file transmission effectively. Cache strategy of leave copy everywhere is uncoordinated and distributed, which fits the random and dynamic vehicular network. The performance evaluation is carried out by comparing the proposed scheme with the legacy solution of TCP/IP based scheme using simulation tools of OMNeT++ and Veins and SUMO, which is supplied with real-world urban map associated with random but reasonable traffic routes generated by our designed software for every vehicle. The simulation results validate the proposed scheme in four aspects: robustness resisting obstacle buildings, reliability and scalability in different traffic loads, low utilization ratios of RSUs and Internet resource, and efficiency of cache functions.