Cross-Layer Assisted Forwarding Strategy for Opportunistic Communication

The rapid growth of mobile devices combined with the vast increase in Internet traffic is posing a challenge to the underlying infrastructure, especially at the wireless edge. Device-to-device communication (D2D) has been recognized as a solution to alleviate the burden on the infrastructure by slowing down the deployment of new base stations. This paper proposes a step towards D2D communication over Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to facilitate content retrieval via a cross-layer assisted forwarding strategy. By choosing ICN, we can circumvent some of the limitations of current MANET routing protocols. We evaluate our proposed scheme on up to 150 nodes in an urban scenario composed of vehicles and pedestrians. Our simulation results showed that our strategy can download up to 13 times more packages than the baseline with lower latency when the cellular network is present.