A comprehensive and configurable simulation environment for supporting vehicular named-data networking applications

Abstract

The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, with its network-layer features, services, and properties, is well-suited for vehicular applications and inter-vehicle communication (IVC). In contrast, IP-based host-centric architectures struggle with challenges inherent to the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) context, such as node mobility, data security, efficient data forwarding, and routing. Named Data Networking takes a fundamental departure from today’s IP-based architectures for VANET/IVC and thus requires extensive experimentation and evaluation. To facilitate experimentation with Vehicular Named-Data Networking, we present the NDN4IVC, an open-source simulator/framework that facilitates testing of more realistic VANET applications via the NDN stack. This project utilizes two popular simulators for VANET simulation: the NS3 network simulator with the ndnSIM module and SUMO, a simulator of urban mobility. NDN4IVC allows real-time bidirectional communication between SUMO and NS3 to support more data about road traffic and vehicular mobility. The framework can model the impact of vehicular networks on road traffic and investigate complex interactions between the two domains. We included two sample applications in VANET to demonstrate how different NDN properties can be used. Experiments were conducted as proof-of-concept studies to demonstrate the potential of the framework and its functionality.