Equipping NDN-VANETs with Directional Antennas for Efficient Content Retrieval

Vehicular ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by intermittent connectivity caused by the mobility of vehicles. To deal with these path breaks, studies propose the use of the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture. In NDN the content is requested and retrieved based on its name and not on location of hosts. Hence, NDN poses as a suitable candidate for VANETs. In NDN-VANETs broadcasting every message is considered the most reliable way for content retrieval to avoid path breaks. In this work, to reduce the usage of network resources, we unicast all messages and we limit the dissemination area of messages by installing directional antennas in every vehicle. Directional antennas assist us to control the network traffic in particular areas. We developed an algorithm for choosing the appropriate directional antenna to send a message, allowing us to decrease the network traffic in vehicles located outside of the spreading area of the message. Furthermore, we use a contention-based algorithm to satisfy unfulfilled requests, when the content is not retrieved after a specific time period. Our results show improvements on the application performance. We retrieve more Data messages faster in the same time period. Finally, we improve the load in terms of sent and received messages on each node.