Abstract
We consider a scheme for offloading the delivery of contents to mobile devices in a vehicular environment. Each content can be delivered to the requesting device either by a neighboring device or, at the expiration of a maximum delay timeout, by the network infrastructure nodes. We propose an analytical model to compute the expression of the probability that the content delivery is offloaded through a Device-to-Device (D2D) communication as a function of the maximum transmission range allowed for D2D communications, the content popularity, and the vehicles speed. We show that, using the proposed analytical model, it is possible to identify the optimal maximum transmission range, which minimizes the total energy consumption (of the infrastructure plus mobile devices).