# Enhancing the 3 GPP V2X Architecture with Information-Centric Networking
## 1 Introduction  
Future automotive services will require a high level of connectivity of vehicles with other vehicles and with communication parties located in the surrounding environment (i.e., pedestrians and road-side infrastructure) and also farther away (e.g., edge/cloud servers and Internet facilities). Such services call for a flexible and high-performing air interface and for other architectural and protocol workarounds that can enable timely and reliable vehicle-to-everything (V2X) data exchange under a paradigm also referred to as Internet of Vehicles (IoV) [1]. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP), after releasing the Long Term Evolution (LTE) specifications for V2X in Releases 14 and 15, is currently discussing further enhancements for Release 16, in order to meet the most demanding V2X performance requirements in alignment with the fifth-generation (5G) system specifications. 3 GPP has adopted Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) as ageneral term covering all interfaces and release enhancements for V2X communications. C-V2X relies on two air interfaces [2]: (i) _the LTE-Uu interface_, the conventional LTE uplink/downlink air interface; and (ii) _the PC5 interface_, also known as the sidelink, which supports direct communications among V2X nodes. The LTE-Uu interface can be useful to interconnect a vehicle to a cloud/edge server; the PC5 interface bypasses the cellular infrastructure and supports communications among vehicles in proximity exchanging, for example, road context information. Similarly to what is happening in other V2X relevant Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs), such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 3 GPP is open to consider networking solutions that replace and/or work alongside the traditional Internet Protocol (IP), on top of the mentioned radio access interfaces [2]. The motivation is twofold. First, IP poorly supports one-to-many communications such as multicast and broadcast, which are expected to be the dominant communication mode in the V2X ecosystem. For example, road traffic information or an accident notification are to be delivered to all vehicles located in a relevant geographical area. Second, IP barely matches scenarios where the identity of the communication end-points is either not known in advance or may change. For example, when a vehicle addresses other vehicles in its neighborhood for cooperative driving purposes, it does not know the identity of its neighbors, and the neighbors dynamically change due to mobility. Among non-IP protocols, in the last decade Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [3] has catalyzed the interest of the vehicular networking community, and not only, as a complementary/alternative solution to IP [4]. ICN turns the traditional IP host-centric philosophy into an approach with the information at the center of attention. This means that while an IP consumer needs the IP address of the host to connect with it and have access to the hosted data content; with ICN the content can be directly retrieved using its (unique) _name_ without referring to the identity of the node generating or holding it. ICN and, in particular, its instantiation Named Data Networking (NDN) (www.named-data.net), well fits the vehicular applications context, which privileges the information to gather (e.g., road traffic conditions in a relevant area and parking lot availability in the city center) rather than the identity of the information provider (e.g., the advertising car). The _connectionless_ transport model of NDN, which does not require the simultaneous connection of consumer and provider to retrieve data, meets the dynamics of the vehicular environment. NDN is based on the exchange of Interest and Data packets, respectively, used (by the consumer) to request and (by the provider) to deliver a named piece of information (i.e., content).