SAVING: Socially Aware Vehicular Information-Centric Networking

Mobile devices today are constantly generating and consuming a tremendous amount of content on the Internet. Caching of such "massive" data is beyond the capacity of existing cellular networks in terms of both cost and bandwidth due to its connection-centric nature. The increasing demand for content poses fundamental questions like where, what, and how to cache and retrieve cached content. Leveraging the shift toward a content-centric networking paradigm, we propose to cache content close to the mobile user to avoid wasting resources and decrease access delays. Therefore, we present SAVING, a socially aware vehicular information-centric networking system for content storage and sharing over vehicles using their computing, caching, and communication (3Cs) capabilities. The encapsulated 3Cs are exploited first to identify the potential candidates, socially important, to cache in the fleet of vehicles. To achieve this, we propose a novel vehicle ranking system allowing a smart vehicle to autonomously "compute" its eligibility to address the question, where to cache. The identified vehicles then collaborate to efficiently "cache" content between them based on the content popularity and availability to decide what and how to cache. Finally, to facilitate efficient content distribution, we present a socially aware content distribution protocol allowing vehicles to "communicate" to address the question how to retrieve cached content. Implementation results for SAVING on 2986 vehicles with realistic mobility traces suggests it as an efficient and scalable computing, caching, and communication system.