Content Replication in Vehicular Micro Cloud-based Data Storage: A Mobility-Aware Approach

This paper presents an intelligent mechanism for a vehicular micro cloud (i.e., a cluster of connected vehicles) to form a regional distributed data storage over V2V networks. Each member vehicle keeps a subset of data contents in their local data storage device, and hands over the contents to other member(s) when leaving the vehicular micro cloud. In order to cope with potential data loss due to failure of content handovers, the vehicular micro cloud creates replica(s) of each data content, and keeps them at different member vehicles. However, even if the system creates multiple replicas, there still remains the risk of losing all of them at once, as vehicles hosting the replicas could move away from the vehicular micro cloud in a short period of time. Such simultaneous failures could frequently occur, since vehicles in the vicinity often have strong correlation in their mobility. To address this issue, our algorithm assigns data replicas to a small subset of member vehicles, whose future mobility is not expected to be strongly correlated with each other. Simulation results show that our mobility-aware replica assignment algorithm can significantly improve the reliability of data management without increasing the number of replicas in a vehicular micro cloud.