Content in Motion: An Edge Computing Based Relay Scheme for Content Dissemination in Urban Vehicular Networks

Content dissemination, in particular, small-volume localized content dissemination, represents a killer application in vehicular networks, such as advertising distribution and road traffic alerts. The dissemination of contents in vehicular networks typically relies on the roadside infrastructure and moving vehicles to relay and propagate contents. Due to instinct challenges posed by the features of vehicles (mobility, selfishness, and routes) and limited communication ability of infrastructures, to efficiently motivate vehicles to join in the content dissemination process and appropriately select the relay vehicles to satisfy different transmission requirements is a challenging task. This paper develops a novel edge-computing-based content dissemination framework to address the issue, composed of two phases. In the first phase, the contents are uploaded to an edge computing device (ECD), which is an edge caching and communication infrastructure deployed by the content provider. By jointly considering the selfishness and the transmission capability of vehicles, a two-stage relay selection algorithm is designed to help the ECD selectively deliver the content through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to satisfy its requirements. In the second phase, the vehicles selected by the ECD relay the content to the vehicles that are interested in the content during the trip to destinations via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, where the efficiency of content delivery is analyzed according to the probability that vehicles encounter on the path. Using extensive simulations, we show that our framework disseminates contents to vehicles more efficiently and brings more payoffs to the content provider than the conventional methods.