Offloading cellular networks through V2V communications — How to select the seed-vehicles?

The rapid increase of portable devices providing a multitude of mobile applications have led to excessive cellular traffic demands and consequently to the overload of cellular networks. Recently, migrating this traffic by opportunistic vehicular networks has attracted a great interest and appeared as a promising solution. Indeed, only a limited set of vehicles (seeds) is selected to download objects from an Internet-content server through the cellular network and then propagate the content gradually by opportunistic communications (i.e. vehicle-to-vehicle V2V). This paper proposes SIEVE, an innovative seed selection scheme, that exploits two key criteria: users' interests and near-future contacts prediction. Based on these criteria, SIEVE allows to select the seeds in order to maximally satisfy the users' interests and, hence, achieve a maximum content utility (i.e. quantitative metric that determines how satisfied are the users). Simulations results show that SIEVE can improve the content utility when compared to other algorithms.