Exploiting Virtualization and Sporadic Clouds for Collaborative Downloading in VANETs: A New Networking as a Service Model

Collaborative downloading of contents from the Internet in VANETs has become a hot research topic. In traditional schemes, most of the vehicles are interested in the same content which is splitted in multiple chunks that are collaboratively downloaded by the nodes and finally delivered to the rest of vehicles over a peer-to-peer network. This paper proposes a collaborative downloading scheme for VANETs with important novelties. First, we support individualized access to web contents from nodes of the VANET (the application nodes), by aggregating the connections available in a Sporadic Cloud which consists of the moving vehicles that are near to the application nodes during a period of time (its collaborators). This allows the nodes can enjoy better Internet connectivity (in terms of availability and bandwidth) than with its own connection only. Second, despite the high mobility of the vehicles, reliable and stable communications among the application nodes and its collaborators are guaranteed thanks to a virtualization layer and a specifically-envisaged routing protocol, which rely on an infrastructure of fixed virtual nodes.