Content and Context Aware Strategies for QoS Support in VANETs

The surging interest in autonomous coordinateddriving and in proactive safety services, exploiting the wealth ofsensing and computing resources which are gradually permeatingthe urban and vehicular environments, is making provisioning ofhigh levels of QoS in vehicular networks an urgent issue. At thesame time, the spreading model of a smart car, with a wealthof infotainment applications, calls for architectures for vehicularcommunications capable of supporting traffic with a diverse setof performance requirements. So far efforts have been revolvedtowards enabling a single specific QoS level. But the issues of howto support traffic with tight QoS requirements (no packet loss, and delays inferior to 1ms), and of designing a system capable atthe same time of efficiently sustaining such traffic together withtraffic from infotainment applications, are still open. In this paper we present the approach taken in the SNFCONTACT project in order to tackle these issues. The goal ofthe project is to investigate how an architecture for vehicularcommunications which integrates content-centric networking, software-defined networking as well as context aware floatingcontent schemes can properly support the very diverse set ofapplication and services currently envisioned for the vehicularenvironment.