SoftStage: Content Staging for Vehicular Content Delivery in the eXpressive Internet Architecture

Client mobility is a fundamental challenge when accessing the current Internet, especially in the context of vehicular networking because of its intermittent connectivity nature. Meanwhile, today's network applications are evolving from host-to-host communication to content retrieval, and fostering new designs of Information-centric networking (ICN) protocol and system optimized towards this end. In this paper, we present SoftStage, a client instructed ICN-based network layer function that effectively manages the edge caching to perform reactive content staging to improve vehicular content delivery without any assumption about the client mobility pattern. Experimental results based on an implementation in eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) shows that SoftStage achieves up to 10x throughput gain in vehicular networking environments.