Cost Optimization for On-Demand Content Streaming in IoV Networks With Two Service Tiers

On-demand streaming of high-quality video content is a widely anticipated vehicular infotainment service. How to reduce the cost of content streaming is a primary concern of the service providers, but is still an underinvestigated subject in the literature. This paper proposes an integrated mobile streaming and caching scheme that jointly leverages two communication service tiers and on-board caching resource for cost reduction. Algorithms are presented to achieve optimal buffering at the session level and optimal caching at the device level. An analytical framework is established to characterize the average cost as a function of the streaming rate in a large scale network. Numerical results demonstrate how the “cost-streaming rate” function changes with vehicle density, network congestion level, content length, and average packet transmission time. We learn an important insight that there is a minimum cost threshold even when the streaming rate approaches zero. We also show that the proposed protocol can effectively reduce the overall cost when the network is not congested. Our findings can provide useful guidelines for the business planning and operation of vehicular content streaming services.