Contract Based Edge Caching in Vehicular Networks

Due to the massive requirements of various kinds of services requested by the expanding scale of vehicles, current caching schemes in vehicular networks face the challenges to decrease the latency, increase the efficiency of the networks and improve the quality of experience (QoE) of vehicles. As an effort, in this chapter, a novel contract based edge caching framework by considering the traffic status in vehicular networks is presented. To be specific, by jointly analyzing the traffic status and the requirements of vehicles, the contracts can be signed between edge caching devices (ECDs) and social vehicles in advance as the prior knowledge to facilitate the edge caching in vehicular networks. Then, based on the social relationships among vehicles, we present the detailed process of contract based edge caching in vehicular networks including content caching, content replacement and content delivery among social vehicles. For each ECD, content caching and replacement are based on three factors which are the contracts signed between vehicles and ECDs, the popularity of contents and the relevance among contents. As for the content delivery among social vehicles, we consider two different cases according to their social ties. Simulation experiment is carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework and the result shows that our proposed framework can outperform the conventional schemes in terms of the average transmission delay.