Cellular Aided Vehicular Named Data Networking

With the recent new paradigm for the future Internet named data networking (NDN), contents are searched by names and not by address, and any node storing a content can also act as a source of information. Such a paradigm appears to be of particular interest for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), to extend internet services to vehicles and support new mobile applications. In VANETs, devices not only use, but also generate contents; devices are generally not constrained in power or memory, thus easily carrying large amount of information; in addition, high mobility continuously creates new opportunities for data exchange. In such scenario, the TCP/IP networking paradigm shows some performance limitations and NDN appears as a way to improve reliability and efficiency of content distribution. However, when node density is limited, the exclusive use of short range communications might reduce the effectiveness of NDN. Motivated by this consideration, we propose the use of cellular networks to carry the signaling part of NDN, and the exploitation of short range wireless communications for content distribution. We will show, through simulations performed in an urban scenario with different vehicle densities, that moving the signaling part to cellular networks significantly improves the performance of NDN compared to the case when only short range communications are used.