Social cooperation for information-centric multimedia streaming in highway VANETs

High-quality multimedia streaming services in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are severely hindered by intermittent host connectivity issues. The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm could help solving this issue thanks to its new networking primitives driven by content names rather than host addresses. This unique feature, in fact, enables native support to mobility, in-network caching, nomadic networking, multicast, and efficient content dissemination. In this paper, we focus on exploring the potential social cooperation among vehicles in highways. An ICN-based COoperative Caching solution, namely ICoC, is proposed to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of multimedia streaming services. In particular, ICoC leverages two novel social cooperation schemes, namely partner-assisted and courier-assisted, to enhance information-centric caching. To validate its effectiveness, extensive ns-3 simulations have been executed, showing that ICoC achieves a considerable improvement in terms of start-up delay and playback freezing with respect to a state-of-the-art solution based on probabilistic caching.