Context-Aware Naming and Forwarding in NDN-Based VANETs

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a technology that allows ubiquitous mobility to mobile users. Inter-vehicle communication is an integral component of intelligent transportation systems that enables a wide variety of applications where vehicles interact and cooperate with each other, from safety applications to non-safety applications. VANETs applications have different needs (e.g., latency, reliability, delivery priorities, etc.) in terms of delivery effectiveness. In the last decade, named data networking (NDN) gained the attention of the research community for effective content retrieval and dissemination in mobile environments such as VANETs. In NDN, the content's name has a vital role in storing and retrieving the content effectively and efficiently. In NDN-based VANETs, adaptive content dissemination solutions must be introduced that can make decisions related to forwarding, cache management, etc., based on context information represented by a content name. In this context, our main contributions are two-fold: (i) we present the hierarchical context-aware content-naming (CACN) scheme for NDN-based VANETs that enables naming the safety and non-safety applications, and (ii) we present a decentralized context-aware notification (DCN) protocol that broadcasts event notification information for awareness within the application-based geographical area. Simulation results show that the proposed DCN protocol succeeds in achieving reduced transmissions, bandwidth, and energy compared to existing critical contents dissemination protocols.