Toward mobility support for information-centric IoV in smart city using fog computing

As a meaningful and typical application scenario of Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has attracted a lot of attentions to solve the increasingly severe problem of traffic congestion and safety issues in smart city. Information-centric networks (ICN) is a main stream of next generation network because of its content based forwarding strategy and in-network caching properties. Many existing works have been done to introduce ICN in IoV because of IP-based network architecture's maladjustment of such extremely mobile and dynamic IoV environment. In contrast, ICN is able to sustain packet delivery in unreliable and extreme environment. However, the frequent mobility of the vehicles will consume ICN's network resources to incessantly update the Forward Information Base (FIB) which will further affect the aggregation processing. For example, geographic location based name schema aggregation will be affected dramatically by mobility problem. On the other hand, fog computing is an edge computing technology usually integrated with IoT by bringing computation and storage capacity near the underlying networks to provide low-latency and time sensitive services. In this paper, we integrate fog computing into information-centric IoV to provide mobility support by allocating different schema taking account of the data characteristic (e.g., user-shareable data, communication data). Moreover, we use the computation, storage and location-aware capabilities of fog to design a mobility support mechanism for data exchange and communication considering the feature of IoV service (e.g., alarm danger in local, updating traffic information, V2V communication etc.). We evaluate related performances of the proposed mechanism in high mobility environment, compared with original information-centric IoV. The result shows the advantages of a fog computing based information-centric IoV.