Intelligent popularity-aware content caching and retrieving in highway vehicular networks

Content dissemination over vehicular networks is a critical challenge due to its high intermittent connectivity. However, content cache and retrieval by exploiting the information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm did not get much attention. In this paper, in order to improve the efficiency of content retrieval, we propose a novel popularity-aware content caching and retrieving strategy in VANETs named P-CCR, which innovatively considers the ICN perspective into vehicles mobility and vehicular wireless communication in highway scenarios. At the same time, it supports to independently switch the retrieval modes between vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) according to the popularity of contents. Most notably, an actively caching mechanism is proposed in P-CCR, which can be triggered to inform surrounding volunteer vehicles to cache contents requested in a short time. Extensive simulations highlight that P-CCR significantly reduces RTT value and the amount of interest packets, which can lighten network loads and avoid wasting resources.