Topic Based Clustering of Vehicles for Information Retrieval and Sharing

The paper proposes a topic based clustering mechanism, which achieves information retrieval and sharing by delegating such responsibilities to those vehicles which have infrastructure access and are willing to provide the service to other neighboring vehicles. The paper leverages the name based transport protocol of Named Data Networking (NDN), builds the request and data routing according to the information topic names through the corresponding cluster head. The paper illustrates the details on how the topic clustering is set up, dissolved and split as needed. It also presents the procedures for a vehicle without infrastructure access to detect, join and leave a topic based cluster. The proposed mechanism has the advantages of preventing the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) from expanding too large and reducing the network bandwidth consumption by avoiding transporting the same content multiple times in serving different neighboring vehicles.