Joint Content-Prefetching, Transmission Scheduling, and Rate Adaptation in Vehicular Networks

Content prefetching at road side units (RSUs) in vehicular networks can improve users’ experience by reducing the average data access latency. Prefetching algorithms proposed in the literature usually rely on a fixed modulation scheme, that corresponds to the lowest possible data rate for RSU-to-vehicles transmission. As a consequence, the network bandwidth is often inefficiently used. In this article, we propose to study the problem of efficient
content broadcasting
in vehicular networks and express it as a joint
data-prefetching
and broadcast transmission scheduling optimization problem, subject to cache size constraints and transmission rate adaptation constraints. In our study we consider a highway scenario covered by several RSUs, and take into account the deadline requirement of interactive applications. We express the problem as an integer linear programming problem, and solve it using a heuristic algorithm that determines: the content prefetching schedule, the broadcast transmission schedule and the rate adaptation schedule sequentially. Simulation results show that,
i)
it is beneficial to use adaptive rates to broadcast data instead of relying on single-rate with unicast transmissions;
ii)
using vehicular trajectories and content popularity in conjunction yields better results than simply relying on content popularity for content prefetching and caching; and
iii)
this holds even with inaccurately predicted vehicle locations and with delay-sensitive contents.