Designing mobile content delivery networks for the internet of vehicles

Content delivery is a key functionality for developing the Internet of Vehicles. In such networks, vehicles act as sensors of the urban mobility by constantly exchanging messages with another vehicles, the cellular network, and also the infrastructure (roadside units). However, the task of delivering content in such dynamic network is far from trivial. In this work, we investigate the development of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) in the context of vehicular networks. Roadside units support the communication by replicating and delivering contents to vehicles within their range of coverage. Initially, we devise a strategy for measuring the performance of the content delivery in vehicular networks. Then, we use the proposed metric for designing a deployment strategy allowing us to identify the better locations for deploying the roadside units in order to properly support the dissemination of a variety of contents, each content requiring specific levels of performance. We compare our deployment strategy to the intuitive strategy of allocating roadside units at the densest locations of the road network. The results demonstrate that our strategy requires less roadside units than the baseline for non-massive deployments in order to achieve similar levels of performance, incurring in less costs when setting up the content-delivery infrastructure.