Named Data Networking for Priority-based Content Dissemination in VANETs

Name-based communication and in-network caching make Named Data Networking (NDN) a promising solution for content dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). So far, different NDN packet forwarding mechanisms have been proposed, but none of them have considered the idea of a prioritized traffic treatment based on vehicular content type. This is instead the focus of this paper, since priority-based content dissemination is a rather crucial objective in vehicular environments in order to meet the requirements of heterogeneous applications. Based on the NDN hierarchical namespace, we propose specific "name-prefixes" that identify globally understood priorities for vehicular data traffic. A prefix-based prioritized technique is then implemented on top of basic NDN forwarding algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed enhancement succeeds in achieving differentiated traffic treatment and in reducing the latency of both high and low priority data.