Infrastructure-Assisted Communication for NDN-VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) include services such as video streaming for automated safety precautions and autonomous driving. NDN is proposed in VANETs as a solution for the connection breaks, since NDN decouples the content exchange from the location of the host. The combination of NDN and VANETs leads to autonomous ad-hoc network architectures that are self-managed. In this paper, we apply the NDN architecture in VANETs, to retrieve information from other vehicles and to save network resources. We present a Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication architecture for NDN-VANETs, which consists of vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs). For installed RSUs along the roads we develop two communication techniques: First, in the centralized approach every node that requests content sends its Interests to the nearest RSU. RSUs are responsible for routing the Interests to the content source. In our second approach, a hybrid communication technique uses RSUs as a backup mechanism and forwards packets to them, if a route to the content source is unavailable. We compare our approaches with our previous work iMMM-VNDN, flooding and AODV. Our results show that we outperform previous works in terms of Interest Satisfaction Ratio and the total amount of Delivered Data in the requester node.