A joint active time and flow selection model for cellular content retrieval through ITS

Operators need to address increased data demands to meet subscribers’ growing requirements by offloading a portion of cellular traffic onto other types of networks. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) for this purpose. We study joint data flow selection and contention resolution in a hybrid VANET-cellular system. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem called FOSAA, which considers vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure link quality, channel access, inter-nodal interference and node active time. The problem is solved through an iterative approach. FOSAA is compared to other proposed schemes. The performance results show that offloading fraction is significantly affected by the data volume, vehicle density and number of hops from the infrastructure to the downloader vehicles.