A novel self-adaptive content delivery protocol for vehicular networks

Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been successfully adapted to deliver content on the traditional Internet. CDNs help reduce the load on the origin server by transferring part of the responsibility to surrogate servers. Content delivery is even more challenging in vehicular networks given their particular characteristics, such as dynamic topology and large-scale scenarios. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose an effective mobile content delivery solution for vehicular networks. The main contribution to adaptation is the use of the dissemination protocol along with the concepts of CDN, in order to increase content availability without compromising network overhead, regardless of traffic conditions and road networks. Some simulations were performed through the NS3 simulator in which the proposed solution presented an excellent performance compared with other six baseline solutions, in both urban and highway road networks, in terms of content availability and network resource consumption through a high coverage about 80% in highways and 98% in urban environments with a low amount of packet loss (approximately 5% in highway scenarios and 15% in urban scenarios).