Edge Caching for Content Sharing in Vehicular Networks: Technical Challenges, Existing Approaches, and Future Directions

The automobiles of today have evolved from electromechanical contrivances to intelligent, autonomous, and connected vehicles that communicate with one another in order to facilitate safer and more comfortable driving experiences. This involves content sharing between vehicles and roadside infrastructure to enable applications such as cooperative driving assistance, road hazard warning, and multimedia services. However, content sharing in connected vehicular networks (CVNs) is highly challenging owing to factors such as the high mobility of vehicles, frequent topology changes, intermittent wireless connectivity, and interference. Thanks to the advent of mobile edge computing (MEC), content sharing for CVNs benefits from proximity merit to tackle these challenges. In this article, we discuss existing edge caching techniques that have been proposed for reliable content delivery in vehicular networks and highlight their benefits and limitations. Furthermore, we enumerate the existing technical challenges that affect optimal edge caching and provide an insight to future research directions for edge caching in vehicular networks.