DOVE: Data Offloading through Spatio-temporal Rendezvous in Vehicular Networks

The increasing mobile traffic is becoming a serious concern for mobile network providers. To address the traffic explosion problem, there have been a lot of efforts to offload the traffic from cellular networks to other networks, such as WiFi hotspots and femtocells. In this paper, we explore the potential benefits of vehicular networks for data offloading and propose a Data Offloading framework using Vehicular nEtworks (DOVE), which reduces the cellular traffic for in-vehicle data services in a cost effective way. DOVE exploits vehicle trajectories for offloading purposes so that content files requested by vehicles can be delivered via vehicular networks rather than cellular networks for economical purposes. We formulate the problem of selecting offloading positions as a spatio-temporal set-covering problem, and propose a time-prediction based set-covering algorithm using vehicle trajectories. Simulation results show that our DOVE framework can significantly reduce 57% of cellular link usage by performing data offloading through vehicular networks.