Information-centric cost-efficient optimization for multimedia content delivery in mobile vehicular networks.

•EcoMD makes use of ICN’s inherent multi-path, multi-source and multi-caching features in vehicular network environments.•EcoMD is based on modeling the multimedia delivery process, considering two essential factors: content mobility and provider supply-demand balance. A mixed integer programming (MIP) optimization is formulated to minimize the economic cost associated to guaranteed quality levels for the multimedia services. The proposed MIP optimal problem is proven as NP-hard.•EcoMD includes three newly designed heuristic solutions for the NP-hard problem focusing on finding sub-optimal solutions by considering (i) prioritybased path selection, (ii) maintaining the least number of sources and (iii) ondemand in-path caching enhancement, respectively.•EcoMD evaluation is based on extensive comparative simulation-based testing. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic solutions and show how the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both quality-related and cost-efficiency-related metrics.