Bus-based content downloading for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) represent promising technologies for comfort driving and entertainment applications which rely heavily on the data downloading. Due to the rapid change of network topology and intermittent connection, it is a big challenge to satisfy the download requirements from multi-vehicles at the same time. This paper proposes a Bus-Based Content Downloading (BBCD) which aims to maximize the volume of downloaded data from bus to vehicles while the download opportunity fairness of each vehicle is taken into consideration. By predicting the number of buses which the vehicle would encounter in its future path and estimating the connection duration that the vehicle stays in the coverage of bus, the proposed BBCD schedules the download service for vehicles slot by slot such that the volume of downloaded data can be guaranteed while achieving the download opportunity fairness. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by extensive simulations.