The Next Generation Vehicular Networks: A Content-Centric Framework

Due to the expanding scale of vehicles and the new demands of multimedia services, current vehicular networks face challenges to increase capacity, support mobility, and improve QoE. An innovative design of next generation vehicular networks based on the content-centric architecture has been advocated recently. However, the details of the framework and related algorithms have not been sufficiently studied. In this article, we present a novel framework of a content-centric vehicular network (CCVN). By introducing a content-centric unit, contents exchanged between vehicles can be managed based on their naming information. Vehicles can send interests to obtain wanted contents instead of sending conventional information requests. Then we present an integrated algorithm to deliver contents to vehicles with the help of content-centric units. Contents can be stored according to their priorities determined by vehicle density and content popularity. Pending interests are updated based on the analysis of transmission ratio and network topology. The location of a content-centric unit to provide content during the moving of vehicles is determined by the forwarding information. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out to show the efficiency of the proposed framework. Results indicate that the proposed framework outperforms the existing method and is able to deliver contents more efficiently.