A distance-based interest forwarding protocol for vehicular information-centric networks

Recently, information-centric networking has been proposed to VANETs scenarios for improving content delivery of infotainment applications. Using the ICN paradigm, content-oriented search and in-network caching have the potential to improve content delivery in spatial- and time-dependent applications for VANETs and smart transportation. However, uncontrolled Interest packet transmissions for content search will result in a waste of resources and diminish the performance of VANETs' applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight protocol to tackle the Interest broadcast storm problem during a content search in information-centric VANETs. The proposed protocol considers the distance between a current forwarder and its neighboring vehicles to opportunistically control redundant Interest packet transmissions in vehicular named data networking. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the content delivery rate by 60% while decreases the Interest packet transmissions by 40%, in the scenario of a low number of content producers in the network.