Advertisement Delivery and Display in Vehicular Networks: Using V2V Communications for Targeted Ads

The role of vehicles has been rapidly expanding to become a different kind of utility, no longer just vehicles but nodes of the future Internet. The car producers and the research community are investing considerable time and resources in the design of new protocols and applications that meet customer demand, or that foster new forms of interaction between the moving customers and the rest of the world. Among the variety of new applications and business models, the spreading of advertisements is expected to play a crucial role. Indeed, advertising is already a significant source of revenue and it is currently used over many communication channels, such as the Internet and television. In this paper, we address the targeting of advertisements in vehicular networks, where advertisements are broadcasted by Access Points and then displayed to interested users. In particular, we describe the advertisement dissemination process by means of an optimization model aiming at maximizing the number of advertisements that are displayed to users within the advertisement target area and target time period. We then solve the optimization problem on an urban area, using realistic vehicular traffic traces. Our results highlight the importance of predicting vehicles mobility and the impact of the user interest distribution on the revenue that can be obtained from the advertisement service.