Information-centric VANETs: A study of content routing design alternatives

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) are network architectures aiming at decoupling locator and identifier of contents, the primary objective of communication. It has been widely assumed that pervasive network caching and name-based forwarding, the most important characteristics of ICN, are beneficial in VANETs. However, these potential benefits have not been examined carefully enough to justify the shift from traditional routing design to ICN name routing and caching in VANETs. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and investigate the potential benefits of ICN in the VANET use case. We consider the two most important ICN-specific design options: caching policies and data source selection policies. Our results show that pervasive caching is indeed a major benefit of the ICN VANET while performance improvement of retrieving content from the nearest cache rather than from the original data producer is negligible, suggesting a return to legacy shortest path routing.