Cooperative mobile edge computing system for VANET-based software-defined content delivery

Next-generation smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) are getting more mature in terms of services and infrastructure requirements. Multiple smart vehicle applications are being conceived these days, including road traffic, road safety and infotainment, all of which are suffering from the WAN-latency problem. In this paper, we propose a Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET)-based Software-Defined Edge Computing infrastructure supporting content delivery services among connected vehicles. The proposed approach leverages network base stations to embed mobile edge computing (MEC) services closer to the vehicles. Our approach can enable the delivery of more competitive services with reduced-latency by utilizing cooperative MEC search strategy for vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications as well as utilizing vehicle-level caching for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications between peers. The framework prototype has been implemented as a clean extension of the Mininet-WiFi emulator. Preliminary results serve as validation of the proposed framework and point out the potential benefits of the approach in mitigating WAN-latency in VANET.