Analytical models of floating content in a vehicular urban environment

Among the many proposed opportunistic content sharing schemes, 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. Previously published results on the performance of vehicular FC have mostly focused on the conditions under which content persists over time in a given region of space, without addressing other important aspects of vehicular FC performance, such as the effectiveness with which content is replicated and made available, and the system conditions that enable good FC performance. This work presents a first analytical model of FC performance in vehicular networks in urban settings. It is based on a new synthetic mobility model (called District Mobility Model - DMM), and it does not require a detailed knowledge of the road grid geometry. We validate our model extensively, by comparison against numerical simulations based on real-world traces, and we prove our model accuracy under a variety of mobility patterns and traffic conditions. Our analytical and simulation results provide evidence of the effectiveness of theFC paradigm in realistic urban settings over a wide range of traffic conditions.