Content distribution in a VANET using InterPlanetary file system

Over the last few years, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been the focus of a great progress due to the interest in autonomous vehicles and in distributing content, not only between vehicles, but also from the Cloud. The main characteristics of VANETs, such as high mobility, intermittent connectivity, scalability and constant changes in the network topology make the content dissemination a challenge, where traditional IP-based dissemination protocols do not present a good result. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol for storing and distributing content, where information is addressed by its content, instead of its location. It has been tested and deployed in wired networks, but never in an environment where nodes have intermittent connectivity, such as a VANET. In this work we propose the use of IPFS in a real vehicular network. We assess its performance in a small real platform, and we propose new modifications and configurations to its support, such as reducing discoverability times. Moreover, we evaluate IPFS in an emulator and in a real city VANET, and we compare it with other content distribution protocols. The obtained results show that IPFS is on par with the Sprinkler vehicular to vehicular protocol, which is built specifically for this use case, and greatly outperforms BitTorrent regarding neighbor discoverability and data transfers.