Information-centric dissemination protocol for safety information in vehicular ad-hoc networks

In vehicular networks, efficient safety information dissemination is a crucial issue. Unique characteristics of such an environment like highly mobility, fast topology changing, short-lived and intermittent connectivity pose challenges for safety information dissemination. Although IEEE 802.11p is standardized as an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 for connection-based wireless communication in vehicular environments (WAVE), it is still an open topic and a challenge to efficiently handle high mobility, intermittent connectivity, and spontaneous characteristics of vehicles on the roadway during wireless communication. This paper exploits information centric networking approach to design an efficient information dissemination protocol for such a challenging environment. The protocol is designed for both communication schemes in vehicular networks including vehicles-to-vehicles and vehicle-to-road. By focusing on information object itself, instead of end-to-end connection, the proposed mechanism supports fast and efficient data dissemination among multiple content consumers and multiple content providers, removing dependence on end-to-end connection between two nodes, thus improve the overall network performance. Through experimental results over different scenarios, we show that the proposed protocol achieves a significant improvement in term of the network performance compared to the conventional approach (WAVE).