Efficient V2V Communications by Clustering-Based Collaborative Caching

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication plays an important role in enabling autonomous driving. However, when multiple vehicles request the same content, like road conditions, delivering it individually by V2V communication can significantly increase traffic volume, potentially causing congestion in the wireless channel. To address this issue, Content-Centric Network (CCN) technology is applied to V2V communication, which improves communication efficiency by exploiting content cached at vehicles. However, previous methods faced the following challenges: (i) vehicles could not use content stored in nearby vehicles outside the communication path, and (ii) redundant caching of the same content occurred at nearby vehicles. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a collaborative caching method in which vehicles are grouped into clusters and each cluster has a designated head responsible for managing caches across all vehicles within the cluster. In this way, this method enables vehicles to use the content cached at adjacent vehicles that are not directly on a communication path. In addition, it eliminates redundant caches, allowing a more diverse range of content storage. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively reduces content delivery latency by 33% compared to the method using clusters without cooperative caching and by 19% compared to the ECV+ method.