NIHR: Name/ID Hybrid Routing in Information-centric VANET

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc network (VANET) has received great attention in recent research, but many challenges still lie in innovating efficient routing protocols to support the highly dynamic environment. Existing ID-based routing protocols cannot fundamentally tackle the dynamic topology problem in VANET. The recent emerging Information-Centric Networking (ICN) makes routing decisions based on data itself instead of a particular host, seeming to have the potential to handle the dynamic topology, but problems (e.g., severe flooding overhead) still remain. Therefore, inspired by the idea of ICN, we propose a name/ID hybrid routing (NIHR) protocol that combines the data-namebased routing and host-ID-based routing to address the above two issues simultaneously. In particular, we develop an announce strategy to improve the efficiency of the in-network cache, and we design a bloom filter based structure to achieve fast content lookup. Simulation results show NIHR's high performance in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Roundtrip time (RTT) and roundtrip hop count. Especially, to verify NIHR’s performance in real-world scenarios, we have implemented a vehicular real-time video conference system based on MK5 OBU [1] (On-Board Unit).