A Dynamic Hierarchical VANET Architecture for Named Data Networking Applications

Named Data Networking (NDN) and its applications are gaining worldwide attention. As many modern services require, NDN concepts will lead to a future data-centric, rather than host-centric, Internet architecture. Extension of NDN concepts to Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are under study to solve many open problems related to content routing, forwarding, while profitably using VANET techniques such as clustering. This paper presents a cluster-based dynamic hierarchical architecture for NDN-VANETs, where content forwarding involve a subset of reference vehicles named 'barycenters'. Both short-range and cellular communications are used, the former for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), the latter for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), to reduce the number of access to the fixed NDN and increase the chance of finding a content in the VANET. The proposed method is described and analytical evaluations are presented to show the potential of the approach.