Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community

Age-of-Information Aware Contents Caching and Distribution for Connected Vehicles

To support rapid and accurate autonomous driving services, road environment information, which is difficult to obtain through vehicle sensors themselves, is collected and utilized through communication with surrounding infrastructure in connected vehicle networks. For this reason, we consider a scenario that utilizes infrastructure such as road side units (RSUs) and macro base station (MBS) in situations where caching of road environment information is required. Due to the rapidly changed road environment, a concept which represents a freshness of the road content, age of information (AoI), is important. Based on the AoI value, in the connected vehicle system, it is essential to keep appropriate content in the RSUs in advance, update it before the content is expired, and send the content to the vehicles which want to use it. However, too frequent content transmission for the minimum AoI leads to indiscriminate use of network resources. Furthermore, a transmission control, that content AoI and service delay are not properly considered adversely, affects user service. Therefore, it is important to find an appropriate compromise. For these reasons, the objective of this paper is about to reduce the system cost used for content delivery through the proposed system while minimizing the content AoI presented in MBS, RSUs and UVs. The transmission process, which is able to be divided into two states, i.e., content caching and service, is approached using Markov decision process (MDP) and Lyapunov optimization framework, respectively, which guarantee optimal solutions, as verified via data-intensive performance evaluation

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

Low-Latency and Fresh Content Provision in Information-Centric Vehicular Networks

In this paper, the content service provision of information-centric vehicular networks (ICVNs) is investigated from the aspect of mobile edge caching, considering the dynamic driving-related context information. To provide up-to-date information with low latency, two schemes are designed for cache update and content delivery at the roadside units (RSUs). The roadside unit centric (RSUC) scheme decouples cache update and content delivery through bandwidth splitting, where the cached content items are updated regularly in a round-robin manner. The request adaptive (ReA) scheme updates the cached content items upon user requests with certain probabilities. The performance of both proposed schemes are analyzed, whereby the average age of information (AoI) and service latency are derived in closed forms. Surprisingly, the AoI-latency trade-off does not always exist, and frequent cache update can degrade both performances. Thus, the RSUC and ReA schemes are further optimized to balance the AoI and latency. Extensive simulations are conducted on SUMO and OMNeT++ simulators, and the results show that the proposed schemes can reduce service latency by up to 80% while guaranteeing content freshness in heavily loaded ICVNs

Content Sharing in Mobile Networks with Infrastructure: Planning and Management

This thesis focuses on mobile ad-hoc networks (with pedestrian or vehicular mobility) having infrastructure support. We deal with the problems of design, deployment and management of such networks. A first issue to address concerns infrastructure itself: how pervasive should it be in order for the network to operate at the same time efficiently and in a cost-effective manner? How should the units composing it (e.g., access points) be placed? There are several approaches to such questions in literature, and this thesis studies and compares them. Furthermore, in order to effectively design the infrastructure, we need to understand how and how much it will be used. As an example, what is the relationship between infrastructure-to-node and node-to-node communication? How far away, in time and space, do data travel before its destination is reached? A common assumption made when dealing with such problems is that perfect knowledge about the current and future node mobility is available. In this thesis, we also deal with the problem of assessing the impact that an imperfect, limited knowledge has on network performance. As far as the management of the network is concerned, this thesis presents a variant of the paradigm known as publish-and-subscribe. With respect to the original paradigm, our goal was to ensure a high probability of finding the requested content, even in presence of selfish, uncooperative nodes, or even nodes whose precise goal is harming the system. Each node is allowed to get from the network an amount of content which corresponds to the amount of content provided to other nodes. Nodes with caching capabilities are assisted in using their cache in order to improve the amount of offered conten

Green Vehicular Content Distribution Network

With environmental awareness becoming a global concern, content distribution has become popular in the context of modern city scenario with obvious concerns for ICT power consumption. The business world demands huge amounts of information exchange for advertisement and connectivity, which is an integral part of a smart city. In this thesis, a number of energy saving and performance improvement techniques are proposed for the content delivery scenario. These are: content cache location optimisation techniques for energy saving and transceiver load adaptive techniques that save energy while maintaining acceptable piece delay. With the recent advancement in Fog computing, nano-servers are introduced in the later part of the thesis for content delivery and process of user demands. Two techniques random sleep cycles and rate adaptation are proposed to save transmission energy. The quality of service in terms of piece delay and dropping probability are optimised by deploying renewable and non-renewable energy powered nano-servers (NS). Finally, mixed integer linear programming models (MILP) were developed alongside other optimisations methods like bisection, greedy and genetic algorithms which judiciously distribute renewable energy to the fog servers in order to minimise the piece delay and dropping probability in heavily loaded regions of the city area