Boosting named data networking for data dissemination in urban VANET scenarios

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a data-centric networking architecture designed for the future Internet. Instead of establishing host-based end-to-end communications, NDN accomplishes the content retrieval and distribution through the delivery of named data. In this paper, we boost the NDN architecture to support efficient content delivery in urban Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). First we propose a new geo-based NDN forwarding strategy to achieve efficient and reliable packet delivery in urban VANET scenarios. Then we investigate the caching redundancy problem with the default full-path caching scheme in VANETs, and present some heuristic strategies to reduce the unnecessary cached copies. Simulation results show that our forwarding strategy can greatly enhance NDN for data dissemination in urban VANETs, which achieves 27%∼75% higher request success ratio, and 40%∼80% lower delay compared with the original NDN strategy in scenarios with different vehicle densities. Besides, the caching strategies can reduce the cached copies by about 50% in dense scenarios with nearly no drops in the success ratio and negligible increase in delay.