Black ice! Using Information Centric Networks for timely vehicular safety information dissemination

Vehicles are increasingly equipped with sensors for safety applications. Sharing information among vehicles can further improve the safety of the overall transportation environment. Enabling each vehicle to get the “right information at the right time” can be valuable to avoid dangerous situations. Information-Centric Networks (ICN) that use the notion of “named-objects” enable information dissemination regardless of location of the publisher or consumer. ICNs, especially supporting publish/subscribe capabilities, can provide timely delivery of the safety information. Our V-ICE architecture utilizes Roadside Units (RSUs) as infrastructure-based aggregators to communicate with vehicles generating notifications. RSUs disseminate information to vehicles that subscribe to the RSUs on their route. To evaluate the benefit of V-ICE, we demonstrate its use in propagating “black ice” warnings to vehicles that will likely be affected on their routes. The critical need is to deliver the information in a timely manner, providing other vehicles sufficient time to react. We build V-ICE's namespace and architecture using the roadways of Luxembourg as an example, and evaluate our approach with a trace-driven simulation using a 4-hour trace generated by SUMO. We show that V-ICE performs better than a server-based approach or even V2V broadcast, in terms of timeliness, relevance, and reduced network traffic.