Storage on wheels: Offloading popular contents through a vehicular cloud

Abstract

The increasing demand for mobile data is overloading the cellular infrastructure. Small cells and edge caching is being explored as an alternative, but installation and maintenance costs for sufficient coverage are significant. In this work, we perform a preliminary study of an alternative architecture based on two main ideas: (i) using vehicles as mobile caches that can be accessed by user devices; compared to small cells, vehicles are more widespread and require lower costs; (ii) combining the mobility of vehicles with delayed content access to increase the number of cache hits (and reduce the load on the infrastructure). Contrary to standard DTN-type approaches, in our system max delays are guaranteed to be kept to a few minutes (beyond this deadline, the content is fetched from the infrastructure). We first propose an analytical framework to compute the optimal number of content replicas that one should cache, in order to minimize the infrastructure load. We then investigate how to optimally refresh these caches to introduce new contents, as well as to react to the temporal variability in content popularity. Simulations suggest that our vehicular cloud considerably reduces the infrastructure load in urban settings, assuming modest penetration rates and tolerable content access delays.

Quality of Experience-Aware Mobile Edge Caching through a Vehicular Cloud

“…In a previous work, we have dealt with the idea of vehicular cloud used to o oad part of the tra c and accessible by handheld devices [24]. However, the paper only mentions initial thoughts about the architecture without dealing with QoE or variable deadlines.…”

“…To deal with such a problem, several works suggest to store content in small cells (SCs) or user equipments. Recently, it has been proposed the use of private or public transportation as storage points and mobile relays (vehicular cloud) [1,2,24] controlled by mobile network operators (MNOs) through a cellular interface. In urban environments, the number of vehicles is expected to be considerably higher than in any envisioned SC deployment.…”

“…is policy solves the optimization problem when a content can be downloaded with large probability in on contact, and deadlines are xed. is policy is suitable for content of small size and is described in Vigneri et al [24].…”

Towards Practical Store-Carry-Forward Networking: Examples and Issues

“…Because of its great potential, however, VANET is now being considered for different purposes. Although the infrastructural facilities for vehicles were deployed with their own purpose, we can borrow those resources and add some functions to provide WSN applications (e.g., weather monitoring and roadway surveillance by in-car cameras [9]) and message relaying for general-purpose use in new applications leveraging information caching/processing on vehicles (e.g., data offloading [29], floating contents [14], and storage infrastructure [5]). All those can be considered as VANET-based cloud/edge computing.…”

On the feasibility of a user-operated mobile content distribution network

“…For example in [27] authors present a cellular assisted mechanism to serve user requests from other mobile users located geographically close, by clustering crowded places in dataspots and by tracking the location of users, as well as the content cached in their devices. An alternative approach is presented in [28], where authors propose the usage of vehicles as mobile caches, as a cheap and more versatile approach to small cells. User interests are delayed in a controlled fashion so that a passing by vehicle fulfil their interests, otherwise their interests are served by the cellular network in an attempt to minimize infrastructure load and guarantee maximum delays.…”