Content delivery enhancement in Vehicular Social Network with better routing and caching mechanism

Abstract

Vehicular Social Network (VSN) emerges as one meaningful scenario of Mobile Social Network (MSN) and aims at addressing the traffic congestion and security problems in smart cities. However, the current IP based network connection cannot efficiently solve the high mobility and dynamically changing topology issues caused by VSN, which results in long routing latency and low cache hit ratio. In this regard, this work intends to optimize the routing latency and the cache hit ratio by solving the content delivery problem in VSN, during which the concepts of fog/edge computing and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are introduced, since they can provide a new perspective of network connection in VSN by concentrating on contents instead of IP addresses. Firstly, the ICN routing table structure is expanded for the purpose of providing key routing basis for both interest and data packets. Secondly, the vehicle social information is fully explored from the points of relationship strength and interest degree to offer reliable data foundation for community detection and packet forwarding. Thirdly, the dynamic vehicle communities are constructed based on an improved community overlap propagation algorithm. By monitoring the content popularity and cache distribution in the dynamic communities, this paper proposes the vehicle-adaptive caching scheme which guarantees the cache diversity and improves the packet delivery rate. After that, a vehicle-adaptive interest packet routing scheme is proposed based on relationship strength and interest degree for both inter/intra communities. The experiment results indicate that the proposed mechanism can improve the network performance in terms of the packet delivery rate, the average hop, the average delay and the overhead.