Content Distribution in VANETs Using Network Coding: The Effect of Disk I/O and Processing O/H

Besides safe navigation (e.g., warning of approaching vehicles), car to car communications will enable a host of new applications, ranging from offlce-on-the-wheel support to entertainment. One of the most promising applications is content distribution among drivers such as multi-media files and software updates. Content distribution in vehicular networks is a challenge due to network dynamics and high mobility, yet network coding was shown to efficiently handle such dynamics and to considerably enhance performance. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of implementation issues of network coding in vehicular networks. To this end, we consider general resource constraints (e.g., CPU, disk, memory) besides bandwidth, that are likely to impact the encoding and storage management operations required by network coding. We develop an abstract model of the network coding procedures and implement it in the wireless network simulator to evaluate the impact of limited resources. We then propose schemes that considerably improve the use of such resources. Our model and extensive simulation results show that network coding parameters must be carefully configured by taking resource constraints into account.