Proactive Caching at Parked Vehicles for Social Networking

The majority of Internet users are active users of social networks and thus social media traffic represents the highest percentage of Internet traffic. The average daily usage of social media has been rigorously growing. Mobile devices are considered to be the most common facilitators of such usage. The aforementioned facts contribute to the excessive traffic load on the Internet, poor users experience in terms of quality of service, and high cellular costs spent by mobile users. In this paper, we strive to reduce these effects by proposing a scheme called Proactive Caching at Parked Vehicles (PCPV). PCPV aims to provide a better quality of service to vehicular users who tend to have a somewhat consistent social networking behavior. In particular, users who have a predictive behavior in terms of the type and time of access of social media platforms as a part of their daily routine during transit from one place to another. This is done by having the required data pre-cached and ready for users to proactively acquire at roadside parked vehicles as they pass by, rather than sending a request to the far-away data center and waiting for the reply. Performance evaluation of PCPV shows significant improvements in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio, and cache hit ratio compared to the reactive approach typically used in infotainment applications.