Cooperative Content Delivery in Vehicular Networks with Integration of Sub-6 GHz and mmWave

With the rapid increase of vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) applications, it is urgent to design an approach which is possible to distribute a large amount of contents to vehicles on the road. However, the current cellular technology is not sufficient due to its limited bandwidth in a dense vehicle environment. In this paper, we propose a protocol which integrates licensed Sub-6 GHz band, IEEE 802.11p, and mmWave communications for the content distribution in vehicular networks. The proposed protocol uses a cluster-based approach where a fuzzy logic-based algorithm is employed to select efficient gateway nodes which bridge the licensed Sub-6 GHz communication and mmWave communication in order to maximize the overall network throughput. IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle communication is used to share information among vehicles in order for achieving efficient clustering. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol under various network conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve significant improvement in various scenarios compared to the existing approaches.