Mobile content distribution with vehicular cloud in urban VANETs

Plenty of multimedia contents such as traffic images, surveillance video, music and movie will flood into vehicular ad hoc networks. However, content distribution over VANETs is not a easy task, due to the high mobility of vehicles and intermittent connectivity. Infrastructure-based scheme can relieve the problem, but with a large amount of investment. In this paper, we propose a mobile content distribution scheme based on roadside parking cloud (RPC), which is formed by the parked car on the roadside, and mobile cloud (MC), which is formed by moving cars on the road. According to a trip history model, a mobile car can estimate its following trajectory. When it wants to download the content, gateway node of the RPC will work out a downloading schedule, which tells it how much chunks it can download from which RPCs. Moreover, the helper of the mobile car in mobile cloud would deliver specified chunks to it when there is lack of RPC in the following trip. Simulation results show that cloud-based scheme performs better than inter-vehicle communication approach and cluster-based scheme.