BusCache: V2V-Based Infrastructure-Free Content Dissemination System for the Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) offers many services aiming to enhance the safety and comfort of drivers and passengers such as accident alarms, congestion avoidance, and multimedia, entertainment applications. Cooperatively sharing and retrieving large-scale files in IoV is a challenging task due extremely volatile nature of IoV. Therefore, it is paramount to develop a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) content delivery mechanism that can adapt to IoV communication requirements. One of the challenging tasks in this regard is to locate content pieces and gather information about peers. Previous proposed systems broadcast beacon messages to the whole network to locate certain content pieces, which consume the bandwidth and limit the network resources. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we propose BusCache, a traffic-aware content delivery system for IoV. BusCache uses buses as trackers for the content distribution on the overlay network, due to their availability and unique characteristics (predefined trajectories and time). Instead of flooding the entire network, a request to the bus is enough to determine the piece’s location. We first propose a clustering strategy to control the data followed between peers without relying on infrastructure, which reduces the end-to-end delay network between the receiving peer and the tracked node. Then we introduce a peer selection mechanism that selects the most appropriate peers that will deliver the desired content by taking into account their velocity, destination, and other traffic-related factors. Finally, we proposed a policy-based content selection algorithm that identifies and prioritizes the scarce content that is present in just a few vehicles. Simulation results show that BusCache can reduce content lookup time and content dissemination compared to state-of-the-art approaches.