Cooperative Content Dissemination on Vehicular Networks

The absence of a timely and cost-effective way to perform over-the-air (OTA) software updates is contributing to defer the deployment of large fleets of connected vehicles. This work presents the design and implementation of a cooperative content dissemination protocol that takes advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication links to distribute data across a network with reduced costs. The protocol uses probing instead of gossiping to reduce the risk of congestion, and parameter design follows statistics from a real vehicular network. Further, we carry out a thorough performance evaluation using 17 vehicles and 5 roadside units (RSUs) of a VANET operator. The results show that the dissemination time is significantly sped up by V2V cooperation and that is heavily influenced by vehicle mobility. Moreover, results show that the chunk size and decision algorithm can have a considerable impact on the performance of the protocol.