Context-Aware Routing and Forwarding Model for NDN-Based VANET

Routing in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) is a challenging topic due to the links intermittency, which in turn makes it difficult to manage routing tables. One solution is routing table management avoidance and the adoption of flooding. This solution is adopted by many state-of-art proposals. However, it can degenerate to broadcast storm problems. Some proposals leverage the characteristics of Named Data Networking (NDN) to improve VANET. They use the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) to manage routes, but flooding is still the main mechanism used to update FIB when nodes move from one to another location. These solutions neither take advantage of the in-network caching, nor adapt routing to VANET context.

Each VANET context presents different routing requirements, thus, a context-aware routing and forwarding model that uses FIB to manage routes is proposed. A mobility prediction mechanism is adopted to update FIB and the list of neighbor. Additionally, all overheard packets are processed in order to update the neighbors list and, thus, avoid frequent broadcasts. To take advantage of the in-network caching, nodes share their list of cached contents when responding to a special request from RSU, querying for new content sources. To attain this objective, modifications of the NDN structures are performed.

An improved performance of VANET is expected, at a cost of an increased computational overhead due to the processing of all overheard packets, and the mobility prediction.