Hybrid 802.11p-cellular architecture for NDN-based VANET

Vehicular network communications (VANET) face multiple challenges due to their intermittent connections and the rapid changes in their topologies. In recent years, several research efforts have explored the use of content-centric approaches to alleviate some of these challenges. One of these promising network designs is Named Data Networking (NDN), which has become a valid solution to support VANET applications. However, in the NDN architecture, the main forwarding mechanism for the interest packets is flooding. This forwarding mechanism will result in excessive collisions, which will lead to the broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we propose VC-NDN: a hybrid and hierarchical Named Data Networking architecture for VANETs. VC-NDN improves content retrieval efficiency through an adapted NDN-based communication model. VC-NDN includes a new interest forwarding scheme to reduce packet collision in the network and an efficient mechanism to support push-based traffic. Furthermore, to reduce communication costs, VC-NDN uses two communication technologies in parallel, namely, IEEE 802.11p and cellular communications, while keeping the usage of the cellular network at a minimum level. Finally, to reduce the impact on vehicle mobility, VC-NDN follows a hierarchical clustering architecture. Specifically, a density-based clustering algorithm is designed to create and maintain stable clusters with multihop communication capability. Our performance study shows that VC-NDN outperforms the basic VNDN solutions in terms of data retrieval delay and packet delivery ratio while minimizing the usage of the cellular network.