Caching Dynamic Information in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Recent advances in VANET technologies have propelled the development and deployment of a wide variety of Vehicular Information Systems (VIS) to vehicles. Such systems provide real-time, crucial information, to drivers, ranging from collision avoidance warnings to the availability of road-side facilities. Despite the invaluable information provided by such systems, the imposed network overhead, due to the necessity of maintaining a global view of the road/vehicular networks and the surrounding environment, cannot be dismissed. In this work we evaluate the performance of VIS when utilizing caching techniques as means of minimizing network overhead. We present an evaluation study of our approach by conducting extensive simulations on large-scale vehicular networks under different realistic urban traffic conditions. Our evaluation results identify the critical parameters that affect information quality in VANETs as well as demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of the cache-enabled VITP.