Decentralized Receiver-based Link Stability-aware Forwarding Scheme for NDN-based VANETs

The inter-vehicle communication in the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) providing ubiquitous mobility to mobile users is considered an essential component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling a wide range of safety and non-safety applications in which the vehicles seamlessly interact and co-operate with each other. The recent paradigm shift in VANETs protocols has led to the adoption of name data networking (NDN) as an underlying communication protocol in VANETs that replaces traditional address-based communication philosophy, treats content as a first-class citizen, and assigns unique names to contents consequently enabling name-based routing and forwarding, caching, and security. Although NDN has significantly improved the underlying communication issues in VANETs, a plethora of challenges such as message broadcast storms, in-efficient packet suppression mechanisms, intermittent connectivity owing to frequent topological changes, and reverse path partioning (RPP) require further attention from the research community. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes decentralized receiver-based link stability-aware forwarding (DRLSF) protocol. The DRLSF is a beacon-less receiver-based multi-hop protocol, well-suited for pull-based applications where end users request desired data by sending packets. The comparative performance analysis validates the effectiveness of the DRLSF protocol in different VANET environments and application scenarios.