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Abstract
The presence of high-end Internet-connected navigation and infotainment systems is becoming a reality that will easily lead to a dramatic growth in bandwidth demand by in-vehicle mobile users. This will induce vehicular users to resort to resource-intensive applications, to the same extent as today’s cellular customers.The research work considers a system where users aboard communication-enabled vehicles are interested in downloading different contents from Internet-based servers. This scenario captures many of the infotainment services that vehicular communication is envisioned to enable, including news reporting, navigation maps, and software updating, or multimedia file downloading. The project outlines the performance limits of such a vehicular content downloading system by modeling the downloading process as an optimization problem, and maximizing the overall system throughput. The research work investigates the impact of different factors, such as the roadside infrastructure deployment, the vehicle-to-vehicle relaying, and the penetration rate of the communication technology, even in presence of large instances of the problem. Results highlight the existence of two operational regimes at different penetration rates and the importance of an efficient, yet 2-hop constrained, vehicle-to-vehicle relaying.