Toward Dynamic Link Utilization for Efficient Vehicular Edge Content Distribution

Abstract

With the significant advance of connected vehicles, future demand for vehicular infotainment services will be greatly increased. Traditional content distribution approaches based on typical cellular architecture suffer from long latency and unstable connections in high-dynamic vehicular environments and even may cause congestion on the backhaul network due to a large amount of requested data. In this paper, we propose a novel content delivery framework by leveraging the 5G edge networks, in which the content caching and data prefetching techniques are exploited accordingly. We investigate the comprehensive dynamic link utilization problem in 5G edge networks from the perspectives of vehicle users and network operator, respectively. For the vehicle users’ perspective, our aim is to maximize the vehicular content distribution throughput through optimal scheduling of vehicular access link slots, and also the utilization problem of backhaul link slots in edge networks is studied to reduce the data access delay of vehicles. For the network operator's perspective, the objective is to maximize the total profit of the network operator, and therefore, the auction model is utilized for the vehicular access link slot scheduling and the backhaul link utilization is analyzed in terms of compensations and costs. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solutions for edge content delivery of connected vehicles.