# Enhancing the 3 GPP V2X Architecture with Information-Centric Networking
## 1 Introduction
Other NDN features that clearly favor mobile communications include _in-network caching_ that enables each node storing the content to be a provider, and _security at a packet-level_ based on the signature on each piece of content [4]. Plenty of literature solutions [4] have investigated the application of NDN principles to IEEE 802.11p-based (please notice that the 802.11 p amendment has been superseded and has become part of the IEEE 802.11 standard; hence, in the following, we simply refer to 802.11) vehicular networks. Conversely, NDN has not been neatly advocated thus far for the C-V2X technology; this would entail further investigation due to the peculiarities of the 3 GPP cellular system architecture and operation, which are radically different from IEEE 802.11. First, the radio resource assignment for localized direct communications among vehicles over the PC5 interface can be _orchestrated in a centralized manner_ by the cellular network infrastructure (i.e., the eNodeB). This is a clear departure from 802.11-based solutions characterized by a _distributed_ access to radio resources. Second, the cellular infrastructure may enlarge the scope of communications _beyond localized single-hop_ interactions with no need to rely on multi-hop forwarding mechanisms, as IEEE 802.11 does, but resorting to broadcast/multicast over a single cell or multiple cells. Indeed, the cellular technology is very versatile in supporting different communication primitives as required by V2X services. Such facts motivated our study, aimed at filling the current gap and presenting our vision about the role of NDN as a key networking technology for 3 GPP V2X communications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that clearly advocates the NDN usage for C-V2X communicationswhile being aligned with ongoing 3 GPP specifications. The main original contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:  
* We advocate NDN as a feasible network-layer option to be included within the purpose-built C-V2X architecture specified by the 3 GPP. NDN can: (i) work alongside the legacy IP; and/or (ii) complement other non-IP based solutions conceived so far for V2X safety data delivery. * We propose a set of design changes and enhancements to the 3 GPP C-V2X architecture to fully enable NDN among the other non-IP networking solutions already supported. Such changes mainly encompass new functionalities in the V2X entities and other 3 GPP network elements, new packet processing and resource allocation algorithms, novel packet fields. The viability of such modifications is also discussed and the performance is evaluated to unveil the benefits compared to a baseline non-NDN approach. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents some basics of the 3 GPP specifications for V2X communications. NDN pillars are discussed in Section 3, where the NDN literature for vehicular communications is also scanned. The contributions of the works are summarized in Section 4, where the design features for the integration of NDN in the 3 GPP V2X architecture are also discussed. The NDN forwarding strategy for 3 GPP V2X communications is presented in Section 5. The evaluation methodology and the simulation settings are presented in Section 6. The results are reported in Section 7, which showcases the benefits of the proposed framework when compared against a baseline (non-NDN) approach. Conclusions are summarized in Section 8 with hints on future works.