Distributed Media Services in P2P-Based Vehicular Networks

A significant challenge in vehicular networks is to efficiently provide heterogeneous media services with the constraints of limited resources, high mobility, opportunistic contact, and service time requirements. In this paper, we study the heterogeneous media provision in peer-to-peer (P2P)-based vehicular networks and develop fully dynamic service schemes with the goals of maximizing the total user-satisfaction and achieving a certain amount of fairness. We first construct a general user-satisfaction model according to the network transmission mechanism, as well as different media delay-satisfaction characteristics. Then, we formulate the media service as an optimization problem and propose a joint content dissemination and cache update scheme. We also provide the exact steps to achieve the optimal solution at equilibrium, given the user-satisfaction function. Furthermore, we extend the proposed service scheme by addressing the fairness problem. Unlike prior works that target at bandwidth or demand fair, we propose a media-aware satisfaction-fairness strategy, which is aware of the characteristic of user-satisfaction and media content and ensures max-min satisfaction-fairness sharing among multiple vehicles. It is worth noting that both schemes are designed in a distributed manner, which is amenable to online implementation for vehicle networks. In addition, we provide extensive simulation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.