# Information-Centric Network-Based Vehicular Communications: Overview and Research Opportunities
## 3 ICN-Based VANET Issues  
The existing papers, such as [8; 9; 10] address the ICN features corresponding to VANET approach, which motivate this article. However, these papers present VANET issues in part or whole in terms of security, routing, mobility, and scalability. In this paper, we investigate the ICN-based VANET challenges with respect to security, routing, mobility, naming, and caching, which are serious issues and must be resolved when ICN is deployed in the VANET environment. The mentioned modules have received a tremendous interest from the VANET research community that works towards the ICN-based VANET deployment. Security, among other features, is the most vital feature of a wireless sensor network, which can be resolved up to a maximum extent. However, there are still some scenarios in which ICN may also face problems. These issues can be categorized into several modes, such as denial of service (DOS) attacks. These attacks may be further divided into numerous types, for example, attacks on (a) authentication, (b) availability, and (c) confidentiality. Authentication is further divided into Sybil and impersonation. In the prior one the attacker exercises various identities at a time, whereas in the latter one the attacker demonstrates himself as the genuine user. Availability is the most vigorous element in the VANET environment, therefore, attackers exercise attacks on this critical aspect. The main aim of attackers in this module is to confirm customers' lives. This element has been presented in the literature rigorously, and interested readers are referred to [10] for in-depth comprehensions. In the third module, confidentiality, the information is merely accessed by the authorized group. In other words, the information must be hidden from unauthorized users. Confidentiality is prone to attacks due to exchanged information in the public network. However, attacks on the confidentiality may be avoided up to a maximum level in ICN as content requests are based on names rather than IP addresses. ICN routing mechanisms are categorized into two classes, i.e., name-based routing and name resolution. In name-based routing, a content request is forwarded on the basis of content name where its related information is stored on the publisher-subscriber path and therefore the content itself is delivered on the reverse path to the subscriber [11]. On the other hand, name resolution can be achieved in two steps. In the first step, the content is matched with a single IP or group of IP addresses. In the second step, a shortest path in the network is followed using any protocol such as Open Shortest Path First (OSFP), and subscribers' requests are forwarded to the content publisher [12]. The existing Internet was designed for fixed devices, where a node's IP should be in the subnet of the network to which it is attached. Nevertheless, the number of non-fixed nodes shows a persistent growth where wireless traffic with 27 billion devices will report for more than 63% of the total IP traffic by 2021 [13]. Mobile devices can easily switch networks, change their IP addresses, and therefore present novel transmission means on the basis of opportunistic and intermittent connectivity [14]. Nonetheless, such kinds of approaches do not attain uninterrupted connectivity, which has become an essential need to a great extent. ICN naming may be divided into two classes, i.e., hierarchical and flat naming. In the hierarchical approach, a name can be made of several hierarchical elements. Where an element may be a series of characters that is created by subscribers. Hierarchical names are easy to understand but they are non-persistent [12]. On the other hand, a flat name approach is more useful as compared to hierarchical one because a hash-table is used to identify the next hop in case of a content request [15]. The supremacy of flat names over hierarchical names is such that flat names can be subdivided and therefore parallel processing can be achieved.