Collaborative Content Delivery in Software-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

The software defined heterogeneous vehicular networks (SD-HetVNETs), which consist of cellular base stations (CBSs) and roadside units (RSUs), have emerged as a promising solution to address the fundamental problems imposed by the surge increase of vehicular content demand. However, due to the ever increasing requirement of the vehicles’ quality of experience (QoE) and the network vendors’ utilities, there come new challenges to motivate CBS to cooperate with RSU for content delivery in order to maximize their utilities and improve the efficiency of the networks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a collaborative content delivery scheme to improve the utilities of the participants (i.e., CBS, RSU and vehicles) in the SD-HeVNETs, where the CBS can cooperate with RSUs by serving a group of vehicles with multicast technology. We first define the utility models to map the profits of the participants in the networks and formulate the utilities of CBS and RSU as two optimization problems. Then, we exploit the double auction game to motivate CBS to cooperate with RSU for the multicast assisted content delivery to address the two maximization problems. Next, the optimal bidding strategies of CBS and RSU in the game are analyzed when the Bayesian Nash equilibrium is achieved. With the optimal bidding strategies, both CBS and RSU can bid for the multicast assisted content delivery services to maximize their utilities based on the network status. Finally, the performance of the proposed cooperative scheme is evaluated by using simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the utilities of all the participants in the networks can be enhanced and the efficiency of the networks can be improved.