# Context-Aware Data Dissemination for ICN-Based Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
[PERSON] 1  
1 Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China  
1 RISE SICS, 16440 Kista, Sweden; [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
[PERSON] 1  
1 Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China  
1 RISE SICS, 16440 Kista, Sweden; [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
[PERSON] 1  
1 Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China
Another trend in networking has been the conception of the novel networking paradigm, information-centric networking (ICN) [4], that does not require global addressing of individual nodes and continuous session establishment and management for data dissemination. The focus of networking is moved from named end-points to the distribution of named data from producers or intermediate caches in the network. The ICN paradigm is a suitable match for many aspects of VANETs. First, the asynchronous ICN communication model is well suited for the frequently intermittent links in VANETs. With the name-based content-addressing scheme, no centralized content server is needed to respond to all the requests, and the content can be cached everywhere. From this point of view, ICN inherently possesses the ad-hoc and delay tolerant features, which is accordant with the features of VANET. Second, the receiver-driven and name-based data delivery mode that decouples senders and receivers reduces the high overhead of mobility management and session maintenance. By doing this, disruptions caused by intermittent links are less severe and communication can resume as soon as a link is available again. Third, the in-network caching mechanism of ICN helps to reduce the latency of obtaining data by vehicles, in particular for data concerning only certain geographic areas. Fourth, most services and applications in VANET are information oriented. Normally vehicles and people on board do not mind who provides the information and how and from where it comes, as long as they can obtain the required information. Finally, unlike many other mobile devices, vehicles do not have limitations on battery size, volume, or weight, so the computing and storage resources required by ICN such as name-based data forwarding and in-network caching can be provided easily at low cost. Hence, the ICN paradigm is suitable for realizing VANETs. However, introducing ICN in VANETs faces challenges. In the receiver-driven ICN paradigm, when an information request (e.g., the Interest packet in NDN (Named Data Networking) [5]) is broadcast through a wireless interface (e.g., IEEE 802.11p), nearby vehicles cannot accurately judge the location of the content holders or providers on account of the movement of the vehicles, so the request might have to be flooded through the network to reach the content holder successfully. When in-network caching mechanisms are used, the content (i.e., the Data packet in NDN) may be responded from multiple vehicular nodes. Each node will also flood the content. The same data will spread everywhere in the network (i.e., data storm). This not only wastes valuable wireless transmission resources but also leads to increased channel contention and broadcast storms causing severe degradation of transmission quality. Furthermore, the density of vehicles and the number of applications running in the vehicles may change heavily and frequently, leading to unbalanced data traffic and link interruption, which may also cause the failure of content requests by having insufficient forwarding nodes. Therefore, it is very challenging to balance the number of forwarded packets and the successful data delivery ratio of each request. Since the network topology varies with the density of vehicles, to keep a high level of data dissemination quality, the routing strategy should dynamically adjust itself to the density of vehicular nodes. In this paper, we propose a context-aware data dissemination mechanism for ICN-based VANET.