Design and performance evaluation of an optimized peer-to-peer content replication scheme for vehicular networks

Owing to the increasing research applied to wireless technologies, it is possible to envisage futuristic scenarios where vehicles will be equipped with long-range and point-to-point capable wireless interfaces. Besides, the availability of efficient content replication architectures and well-suited optimization schemes, allow to port actual peer-to-peer (p2p) frameworks to such scenarios. This paper introduces the design and the performance evaluation of an optimized p2p-based replication scheme, to exploit content delivery through a mobile vehicular network. This is obtained through a discrete-time dynamic system over which an optimization problem must be solved in real-time. Such a solution enables two different operations: i) to overcome bandwidth limitations in order to distribute information among vehicles (e.g., traffic or security bulletins and multimedia contents) in an efficient way; ii) to use the vehicular flow as a "virtual backbone" to deliver data to different spatial locations without the need of a fixed infrastructure. Simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, with respect to classic p2p distribution schemes directly ported over the vehicular network.