SDN enabled content distribution in vehicular networks

With the rapid advances of cellular and DSRC communication technologies, vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication will greatly improve the safety and mobility of future transportation systems. Nevertheless, current TCP/IP based networking services are too rigid to support large scale bandwidth-intensive content distribution. We focus on two challenging applications: distribution of real-time traffic information to all road vehicles and distribution of bandwidth-intensive media data. In this paper, we propose a Type-Based Content Distribution (TBCD) approach to support large scale data intensive content distribution in vehicular networks. It utilizes the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology to support efficient in-network replication and caching. According to the different types of the content, our method takes a push-and-pull pattern to transmit the content. Also, we take different policies based on the number of subscribers to utilize the push-and-pull pattern more efficiently. It aims to achieve the following points: (1) to balance reliability and redundancy of the content forwarding, and (2) to minimize the impact of disconnection when transmitting the content in a vehicular wireless network.