Gaetano Manzo

SDN coordination for CCN and FC content dissemination in VANETs

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks has a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising and parking notifications, to traffic and emergency warnings. This heterogeneity requires optimizing content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles to deliver data with short latency and without jeopardizing network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine Content Centric Networking (CCN) and Floating Content (FC) enable new and efficient solutions to this issue. Moreover, we describe how a network architecture based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) can support both CCN and FC by coordinating distributed caching strategies, by optimizing the packet forwarding process and the availability of floating data items. For each scenario analyzed, we highlight the main research challenges open, and we describe a few possible solutions.

Performance Modeling of Vehicular Floating Content in Urban Settings

Among the proposed opportunistic content sharing services, Floating Content (FC) is of special interest for the vehicular environment, not only for cellular traffic offloading, but also as a natural communication paradigm for location-based context-aware vehicular applications. Existing results on the performance of vehicular FC have focused on content persistence, without addressing the key issues of the effectiveness with which content is replicated and made available, and of what are the conditions which enable acceptable FC performance in the vehicular environment. This work presents a first analytical model of FC performance in vehicular networks in urban settings. It is based on a variation of the random waypoint (RWP) mobility model, and it does not require a model of road grid geometry for its parametrization. We validate our model extensively, through numerical simulations on real-world traces, showing its accuracy on a variety of mobility patterns and traffic conditions. Through analysis and simulations, we show the feasibility of the FC paradigm in realistic urban settings over a wide range of traffic conditions.

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Adaptive and Context Aware Content Dissemination in VANETs

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) has the potential to enable a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising, traffic and emergency warnings to infotainment. This variety in applications and services calls for mechanisms able to optimize content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles, without jeopardizing network resources. Content Centric Networking (CCN), takes advantage of inherent content redundancy in the network in order to decrease the utilization of network resources, improve response time and content availability, coping efficiently with some of the effects of mobility. Floating Content (FC), on the other hand, holds potential to implement efficiently a large amount of vehicular applications thanks to its property of geographic content replication, while Software Defined Networking (SDN), is an attractive solution for the lack of flexibility and dynamic programmability that characterizes current VANET architectures. By implementing a logical centralization of the network, SDN enables dynamic and efficient management of network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine CCN, FC and SDN enable an innovative adaptive VANET architecture able to efficiently accommodate to intermittent connectivity, fluctuating node density and mobility patterns on one side and application performance and network resources on the other side, aiming to achieve high QoS. For each scenario, we highlight the main open research challenges, and we describe possible solutions to improve content dissemination and reduce replication without affecting content availability.

Poster abstract: Feasibility of floating content in VANETs

VANETs can benefit by using an infrastructure-less model such as Floating Content (FC) in absence of infrastructures or as support to these latter. This work presents FC performances in vehicular context by using Random Waypoint mobility model.

Coordination mechanisms for floating content in realistic vehicular scenario

The increasing interest in vehicular communications draws attention to scalability and network congestion problems and therefore on techniques to offload the traffic, typically carried through the infrastructure, to the Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network. Floating content (FC) represents a promising paradigm to share ephemeral content without direct support from infrastructure. It is based on constraining geographically within the Anchor Zone (AZ) the opportunistic replication of a given content among vehicles, in a way that strikes a balance between minimization of resource usage and content availability. Existing works on FC performance modeling are based on standard, homogeneous synthetic mobility models, and it is hence unclear how they actually fit in realistic mobility scenarios. Moreover, the approaches to FC dimensioning they propose assume users have full knowledge of Spatio-temporal mobility patterns, which is hard to achieve in practice. Finally, despite FC is an infrastructure-less communication paradigm, some form of infrastructure support could be available in the vast majority of those application scenarios for which it has been proposed. In this paper, we perform a first attempt at tackling these issues. We focus on how to dimension an Anchor Zone in a realistic vehicular scenario. We propose the first set of simple dimensioning strategies, based on the estimation of some key mobility parameters and of FC performance. We assess such strategies on measurement-based vehicular traces, providing a first indication of their relative performance, and of the feasibility of FC in practical scenarios.

Feasibility of Floating Content in VANETs

VANETs can benefit by using an infrastructure-less model such as Floating Content (FC) in absence of infrastructures or as support to these latter. This work presents FC performances in vehicular context by using Random Waypoint mobility model.