Theoretical analysis on caching effects in urban vehicular ad hoc networks

Most applications in urban vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) rely on information sharing, such as real-time traffic information queries, and advertisements. However, existing data dissemination techniques cannot guarantee satisfactory performance when amounts of information requests come from all around the network. Because these pieces of information are useful for multiple users located in various positions, it is beneficial to spread the cached copies around. Existing work proposed caching mechanisms and conducted simulations for validation, but there is a lack of theoretical analysis on the explicit caching effects. Because of the complex urban environment and high mobility of vehicles, quantifying the caching effects on the VANET performance is quite challenging. We present the cache coverage ratio as the metric to measure the caching effects, and theoretical analysis is given based on reasonable assumptions for urban VANETs, through which we find the affecting factors include vehicle density, transmission range, and ratio of caching vehicles. We deduce the quantitative relationship among them, which have similar forms as the cumulative density function of an exponential distribution. We also consider the impact of vehicle mobility to predict the future cache effect on surrounding roads of the caching area. We conduct intensive simulations, which verify that the theoretical analysis results match quite well with the simulated reality under different scenarios.