An Information-Centric In-Network Caching Scheme for 5G-Enabled Internet of Connected Vehicles

With the increasing on-board demand for intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs), the fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems are being massively utilized in vehicular networks. As an essential component, content retrieval in the ICV provides a basis for vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure data interaction for many applications. However, content access is still subject to performance degradation due to congested communication channels, diverse requests patterns, and intermittent network connectivity. To mitigate these issues, in-network caching in 5G-enabled ICV has been leveraged to benefit content access by allowing edge nodes to store content for data generators. In this paper, we propose an in-network caching scheme to support various provisions of data sharing in the ICVs by exploring the advantages of information-centric networks (ICN). We first divide each on-board service into several content units. Then, we place these units at the ICV and small cell base stations (SBSs) to reduce the content retrieval delay, further model the proposed system as an integer nonlinear program (INLP) and attain the optimal QoE (Quality of Experience) by placing content units at appropriate cache entities. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and correctness of our proposed model through extensive simulations.