Cooperative Content Downloading Protocol Based on the Mobility Information of Vehicles in Intermittently Connected Vehicular Networks

Intermittently connected vehicular networks consist of stationary roadside units (RSUs) deployed along roads and vehicles moved on them. In ICVNs, long inter-RSU distances and large-size vehicular contents lead to long downloading delays to vehicles and high traffic overheads on backhaul links. Fortunately, the increase of caching ability and the enhancement of mobility prediction in vehicles are a great opportunity to alleviate these problems by prefetching contents. In this paper, we propose a prefetching protocol with cooperation of both vehicles and RSUs. Based on the mobility information of vehicles, our protocol selects an efficient prefetching vehicle for relaying contents and a next RSU for proactively caching contents to enhance content download performances. Simulation results verify that our protocol achieves better performances than previous prefetching protocols.