Over the last few years, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been the focus of a great progress due to the interest in autonomous vehicles and in distributing content, not only between vehicles, but also from the Cloud. The main characteristics of VANETs, such as high mobility, intermittent connectivity, scalability and constant changes in the network topology make the content dissemination a challenge, where traditional IP-based dissemination protocols do not present a good result. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol for storing and distributing content, where information is addressed by its content, instead of its location. It has been tested and deployed in wired networks, but never in an environment where nodes have intermittent connectivity, such as a VANET. In this work we propose the use of IPFS in a real vehicular network. We assess its performance in a small real platform, and we propose new modifications and configurations to its support, such as reducing discoverability times. Moreover, we evaluate IPFS in an emulator and in a real city VANET, and we compare it with other content distribution protocols. The obtained results show that IPFS is on par with the Sprinkler vehicular to vehicular protocol, which is built specifically for this use case, and greatly outperforms BitTorrent regarding neighbor discoverability and data transfers.

在过去的几年里，由于对自动驾驶汽车和内容分发的兴趣，车载自组织网络 (VANET) 一直是取得重大进展的重点，不仅在车辆之间，而且来自云端. VANETs的主要特点，如高移动性、间歇性连接、可扩展性和网络拓扑结构的不断变化，使内容传播成为挑战，而传统的基于IP的传播协议并没有呈现出良好的效果。星际文件系统 (IPFS) 是一种用于存储和分发内容的协议，其中信息通过其内容而不是其位置来寻址。它已经在有线网络中进行了测试和部署，但从未在节点具有间歇性连接的环境中，例如 VANET。在这项工作中，我们建议在真实的车载网络中使用 IPFS。我们在一个小型真实平台上评估它的性能，并提出新的修改和配置来支持它，例如减少可发现时间。而且，我们在模拟器和真实城市 VANET 中评估 IPFS，并将其与其他内容分发协议进行比较。获得的结果表明，IPFS 与专门为此用例构建的 Sprinkler 车对车协议相当，并且在邻居发现和数据传输方面大大优于 BitTorrent。