Driven by both safety concerns and commercial interests, one of the key services offered by vehicular networks is popular content distribution (PCD). The fundamental challenges to achieve high speed content downloading come from the highly dynamic topology of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) and the lossy nature of the vehicular wireless communications. In this paper, we introduce CodeOn, a novel push-based PCD scheme where contents are actively broadcasted to vehicles from road side access

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... ts and further distributed among vehicles using a cooperative VANET. In CodeOn, we employ a recent technique, symbol level network coding (SLNC) to combat the lossy wireless transmissions. Through exploiting symbol level diversity, SLNC is robust to transmission errors and encourages more aggressive concurrent transmissions. In order to fully enjoy the benefits of SLNC, we propose a suite of techniques to maximize the downloading rate, including a prioritized and localized relay selection mechanism where the selection criteria is based on the usefulness of vehicles' possessed contents, and a lightweight medium access protocol that naturally exploits the abundant concurrent transmission opportunities. We also propose additional mechanisms to reduce the protocol overhead without sacrificing the performance. Extensive simulation results show that, under a wide range of scenarios, CodeOn significantly outperforms a representative state-of-the-art scheme.