STRIVE: Socially-Aware Three-Tier Routing in Information-Centric Vehicular Environment

Content distribution in vehicular networks is greatly impaired by high mobility and intermittent connectivity. Social-aware content distribution schemes based on typical centrality metrics address the challenge, however they suffer due to their network-centric nature instead of information centric. We suggest to exploit the recently proposed information-centric networking architecture which cater the issue by decoupling host-user and support in-network caching at intermediate nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel information-centric social-aware content distribution protocol, STRIVE confining the broadcast nature of interest/content by routing it selectively towards high centrality information facilitator vehicles. We use a three-tier forwarding strategy to discover potential local and global information facilitators in an urban environment for efficient content delivery. The performance evaluation implements a scalable simulation environment deploying up to 2986 vehicles using realistic vehicular mobility traces. Simulation results show that our proposed novel vehicle centrality based content distribution protocol, STRIVE outperforms existing social content distribution metrics used in the literature.