VET, an epidemic transport protocol for retrieving multimedia contents in vehicular networks

The availability of multimedia contents to be played back while driving constitutes an added value to both drivers and passengers, improving the travel experience. These contents can be already on-board, diffused through broadcast networks or delivered on demand by servers as data streams. Vehicular ad-hoc networks allow envisaging a new way to access multimedia contents based on epidemic data dissemination, tearing down the costs for both the user and the content publisher, and increasing system scalability. In this paper, we propose VET, a collaborative system for content diffusion and retrieval among traveling vehicles that relies on multicast epidemic dissemination of messages and exploits vehicles mobility and their local storage capabilities.