Information-Centric Networking for VANETs

The peculiarities of the vehicular environment, characterized by dynamic topologies, unreliable broadcast channels, short-lived and intermittent connectivity, call into the question the capabilities of existing IP-based networking solutions to support the wide set of initially conceived and emerging vehicular applications. The research community is currently exploring groundbreaking approaches to transform the Internet. Among them, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm appears as a promising solution to tackle the aforementioned challenges. By leveraging innovative concepts, such as named content, name-based routing, and in-network content caching, ICN well suits scenarios in which applications specify what they search for and not where they expect it to be provided and all that is required is a localized communication exchange. In this chapter, solutions are presented that rely on Content-Centric Networking (CCN), the most studied ICN approach for vehicular networks. The potential of ICN as the key enabler of the emerging vehicular cloud computing paradigm is also discussed.