This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY 1 Engineering a Distributed In

Abstract—This work proposes a practical and cost-effective approach to construct a fully distributed roadside communication infrastructure to facilitate the localized content disseminations to vehicles in the urban area. The proposed infrastructure is composed of distributed light-weight low-cost devices called roadside buffers (RSBs), where each RSB has the limited buffer storage and is able to wirelessly transmit the cached contents to fast-moving vehicles. To enable the distributed RSBs working towards the global optimal performance (e.g., minimal average file download delays), we propose a fully distributed algorithm to optimally determine the content replication strategy at RSBs. Specifically, we first develop a generic analytical model to evaluate the download delay of files, given the distribution of content files at RSBs. We then formulate the RSB content replication process as an optimization problem, and devise a fully distributed content replication scheme accordingly to enable vehicles to intelligently recommend the desirable content files to RSBs. The proposed infrastructure is designed to optimize the global network utility which accounts for the integrated download experience of users and the download demands of files. Using extensive simulations, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed infrastructure and show that the proposed distributed protocol can approach to the optimal performance and significantly outperform the traditional heuristics