A novel hybrid forwarding strategy for content delivery in wireless information-centric networks

In this paper, we design a robust ICN-based forwarding strategy, called Ad Hoc Dynamic Unicast (ADU), that wisely harnesses unicast and broadcast primitives on top of IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks. ADU relies on unicasting for content dissemination after the provider discovery, and promptly falls back to broadcast to find a new content provider in case of a link failure notified by the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Extensive simulations in two different multi-hop wireless scenarios, i.e., mobile and vehicular ad hoc networks, under different load settings, assess the ADU performance against benchmark ICN forwarding schemes, representative of broadcast-based and unicast-based solutions. Results show that ADU outperforms them in all circumstances, proving its better responsiveness to link failures, which guarantees a shorter content retrieval delay and a lower message overhead and energy consumption.