Cooperative cache transfer-based on-demand network coded broadcast in vehicular networks

Real-time traffic updates, safety and comfort driving, infotainment, and so on, are some envisioned applications in vehicular networks. Unlike traditional broadcast, network-coding-assisted broadcast can satisfy multiple vehicles with different data items in a coded form. However, server side encoding requires the prior knowledge about vehicles’ cache information for the successful decoding at the vehicles’ sides. The explicit cache upload from vehicles to Road Side Unit (RSU) wastes upload bandwidth. In multi-RSU vehicular networks, we propose a Cooperative Cache Transfer-based On-demand Network Coded Broadcast called CCTCB. In the proposed CCTCB approach, vehicles do not need to upload their cache information to the server, rather the RSU server learns the vehicles’ cache intrinsically. We derive a probabilistic model to analyze the coding opportunity in the proposed cooperative cache transfer mechanism incorporating vehicle mobility. The comprehensive simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed approach.