LoICen: A novel location-based and information-centric architecture for content distribution in vehicular networks

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The information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm has gained increasing attention as a solution for boosting content delivery in vehicular network applications. The content-naming oriented search and in-network data caching procedures of ICN can improve content delivery by avoiding the need to determine and maintain end-to-end routing paths in vehicular networks, which is challenging due to the mobility of vehicles, and intermittent and short-lived connections between them. However, the use of the ICN paradigm in vehicular networks aggravates the broadcast storm problem, and constantly suffers from breaks in the reverse path used for content discovery and delivery. In this paper, we propose the location-based and information-centric (LoICen) architecture to improve the content request procedure and reduce the broadcast storm problem in intelligent vehicular networks. In the LoICen architecture, vehicles opportunistically obtain the location information of the vehicles that might have desired content in their cache. This location information is used whenever possible to improve content search and discovery by directing Interest packets to the area where the content may be located, mitigating the broadcast storm problem by selecting only the most suitable neighboring vehicle at each hop to continue forwarding the Interest packet, and improving content delivery by selecting more stable paths. Simulation results show that the LoICen architecture outperformed related work in terms of content delivery ratio, while reducing the delay for the content delivery and the number of transmissions of Interest packets for content search.