The Role of Parked Cars in Content Downloading for Vehicular Networks

When it comes to content access using Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), data will mostly flow through Road Side Units (RSUs), deployed in our cities. Unfortunately, the RSU coverage is expected to be rather scattered. Instead of relying on RSUs only, the paper investigate the possibility of exploiting parked vehicles to extend the RSU service coverage. Our approach leverages optimization models aiming at maximizing the freshness of content that downloaders retrieve, the efficiency in the utilization of radio resources, and the fairness in exploiting the energy resources of parked vehicles. The latter is constrained so as not to excessively drain parked vehicle batteries. Our approach provides an estimate of the system performance, even in those cases where users may only be willing to lease a limited amount of their battery capacity to extend RSU coverage. Our optimization-based results are validated by comparing them against ns-3 simulations. Performance evaluation highlights that the use of parked vehicles enhances the efficiency of the content downloading process by 25%-35% and can offload more than half the data traffic from RSUs, with respect to the case where only moving cars are used as relays. Such gains in performance come at a small cost in terms of battery utilization for the parked vehicles, and they are magnified when a backbone of parked vehicles can be formed.