Content Dissemination and Routing for Vehicular Social Networks: A Networking Perspective

Content dissemination and routing are crucial issues in VSNs. Content dissemination is distributing contents to users or areas of interest while routing is delivering messages to target users/locations. How to achieve efficient content dissemination and routing in VSNs has attracted a lot of attention and much work has been carried out. Existing work in this area has mainly considered various characteristics of VSNs such as centrality, community, social ties, mobility pattern, context information, and so on. In this article, we present a survey of state-of-theart protocols in this area. We first discuss how VSNs differ from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks and also mobile social networks from a networking perspective. We then introduce typical structures of VSNs and their social properties, which have a big impact on the performance of content dissemination and routing in such networks. We then divide existing protocols based on different design criteria. We introduce how each of the protocols works and discuss their merits and deficiencies. Finally, we point out some open issues in this area.