Forwarding strategies in vehicular named data networks: A survey

Abstract

The traditional Internet architecture provides applications with a stable end-to-end connection between a requester and a source node holding the information. However, in a vehicular environment, this connection is not stable due to the mobility of vehicles that results in location change, from the requester, the source, or both. To overcome these situations, Named Data Networking (NDN) has been proposed as new architecture for data retrieval and mobility support. This new paradigm enhances content access and dissemination by decoupling the content from its original location. In this paper, we introduce the forwarding in NDN-based VANETs and highlight its benefits and limitations. We propose a classification of NDN-based VANETs forwarding strategies, then detail the representative schemes. Furthermore, we provide a review and comparison of existing forwarding strategies in terms of various attributes such as transmission mode, forwarding strategies, changes of NDN architecture, application scenarios, problem addressed, evaluation metrics, simulation platform. Finally, we conclude our contribution by identifying main open research challenges that can be exploited for future works. We believe that this survey will help NDN-based VANETs researchers community to easily understand the forwarding in vehicular environment, overcome some repeated solutions and gives further inspiration to design a new protocols to improve NDN-based VANETs networks in this context for further relevant research works.