Information-centric cost-efficient optimization for multimedia content delivery in mobile vehicular networks

Providing high-quality multimedia services is a challenging and high-cost task in mobile vehicular networks due to intermittent connectivity, highly dynamic capacity, mostly associated to heterogeneous hosts distribution and their high mobility. Information-centric networking (ICN), which adopts novel content-based dissemination instead of the traditional host-based one, has great potential to accomplish cost-efficient quality-oriented multimedia delivery. This paper proposes a novel cost-Efficient Multimedia content Delivery approach (EcoMD) in vehicular networks leveraging the ICN features. In EcoMD, two essential factors are first analyzed and modeled: content mobility and supply-demand balance, and then, a mixed integer programming (MIP) optimization is formulated to minimize the economic cost associated to guaranteed the quality level of multimedia services. To resolve this NP-hard problem, heuristic mechanisms are proposed covering three aspects: priority-based path selection, least-required source maintaining and on-demand caching enhancement. By comparison with existing state-of-the-art solutions, simulation results demonstrate how EcoMD provides an improved performance in terms of start-up delay, jitter, playback continuity, and Quality of Experience (QoE) while particularly reduces the economic cost.