NameCent: Name Centrality-Based Data Broadcast Mitigation in Vehicular Named Data Networks

Named Data Networking (NDN), an extension of the Content-centric network (CCN), is not an unfamiliar word. It is considered as one of the promising future network architecture. NDN focuses on naming the content regardless of end-to-end device addresses. NDN has been adopted for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), and it has promising results. Though NDN has robust architecture, many challenges still exist, including consumer and producer mobility, naming, and Interest and data packet flooding. In vehicular NDN, the consumer vehicle broadcasts an Interest packet for the required content. The producer vehicle or an intermediate vehicle that contains the required content in its cache replies with the data packet after receiving the Interest packet. The data packet reaches the consumer vehicle via simple broadcasting. This data broadcast creates congestion in the network and needs to be mitigated. In this work, we coin a new term called name centrality, and using it along with received signal strength, we have proposed a novel scheme to control data broadcast storm in vehicular NDN. The scheme uses the mentioned two parameters to allow only a subset of potential forwarding vehicles to rebroadcast the data packet instead of all the vehicles which receive the data packets. This reduces the copies of data packets processed and propagated in the network and hence alleviates congestion. The scheme is evaluated through extensive simulation under different scenarios, and it outperforms the legacy schemes. The comparison has been made in terms of copies of total data packets processed, Interest satisfaction delay, and Interest satisfaction rate. Compared to other approaches, the proposed scheme reduced the average copies of data packets processed by 55% and 20% with varying Interest packet rates and 58% and 19% with varying vehicle speed.