Hybrid information forwarding in VANETs through named data networking

This paper investigates the issue of multi-hop forwarding in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), which is suffering from rapidly changing topology, short-lived and intermittent connectivity. Designed to replace TCP/IP using named data, Named Data Networking (NDN) has natural advantages to greatly overcome those challenges because of its multi-source and in-network caching characteristics. However, in the wireless environment the Interest and Data, proposed in NDN, are usually flooded because of the absence of Forwarding Information Base (FIB). To tackle this problem, we propose HVNDN, a hybrid forwarding strategy through NDN. More specifically, HVNDN introduces opportunistic and probabilistic forwarding strategy for location-dependent and location-independent information, respectively, which takes full advantage of geographic information and the characteristics of named data in VANETs. To make Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication more effective and reliable, we design elaborate Interest and Data packets formats, retransmission and acknowledgement mechanism in HVNDN. Simulation results from NS-3 demonstrate that the proposed forwarding strategy outperforms the state-of-art scheme with less end-to-end delay and overhead.