# Insights from the Experimentation of Named Data Networks in Mobile Wireless Environments
## 3 Integrating NDNs in Smart Cities
### Aveiro Tech City Living Lab Infrastructure  
Aveiro Tech City Living Lab (ATCLL) is an advanced, large-scale sensing, communications and computation infrastructure, spread throughout the city of Aveiro  
Figure 2: NDN basic principle. (**a**) Consumer and Producer interaction. (**b**) Node’s control structures.  
in Portugal. The ATCLL is composed of an advanced communications infrastructure and a platform for the analysis and management of urban data that, together, make it possible to provide an open and large-scale technological laboratory in the city. The access infrastructure is supported by state-of-the-art fiber technology, reconfigurable radio units, 5G-NR radio and 5G network services, aggregating and interconnecting a range of sensors and remote information collection units that span the entire area of the city. Buses and garbage collection vehicles have also been equipped with communication units with Wi-Fi, ITS-G5 and 5G technologies, mobility sensors (GPS, traffic radars, LiDARs, and video cameras) and environmental sensors (such as temperature, humidity, pollution). This set of sensors record mobility and environmental data, building a complete live map of these parameters in the city, and providing the required data for its management, such as traffic monitoring and safe driving systems.  
As illustrated in the left side of Figure 3, network nodes are also installed in the vehicles and local boats to transmit mobility and environment data to the data processing centre. In the vehicular network supported by ATCLL, the vehicles are equipped with On-Board Units (OBUs) to establish a connection with the Road Side Units (RSUs) and with the other vehicles. OBUs and RSUs were implemented using PC Engines APUs ([[https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm](https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm)]([https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm](https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm)) accessed on 7 June 2022) (Photo on the right side of the Figure 4) using an Ubuntu Linux distribution, offering vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication over IEEE 802.11p interfaces (WAVE with ITS-G5 support), Wi-Fi, Ethernet and cellular communication (ready to integrate 5G modules). APUs use CPU AMD GX-412 TC with 4 cores, 4 GB DRAM, 30 GB HDD, and Debian GNU/Linux 11.  
Figure 3: Aveiro Tech City Living Lab: communication architecture (on the **left**) and infrastructure’s map (on the **right**).  
With restricted devices such as APUs, a scheme that allows dynamic publication of services on demand becomes essential. Thus, our solution for the deployment of NDN adopts a strategy of microservices made available through lightweight containers. This strategy allows us not only to deploy on demand, but also to include services migration to meet the mobility of OBUs, in addition to facilitating the configuration of devices on-the-fly as needed by the applications. Moreover, using lightweight containers, we isolate the NDN network stack from the TCP/IP network stack, ensuring complete independence from the operation of the networks while preparing the ATCLL for new network paradigms that may arise in the future.  
To implement our NDN using containers we opted for Docker ([[https://www.docker.com/](https://www.docker.com/)]([https://www.docker.com/](https://www.docker.com/)) accessed on 7 June 2022). Docker is a platform for service virtualization where containers operate in isolation using their own software, libraries and configuration files. We prepare our Docker base image with S.O. Ubuntu ([[https://ubuntu.com](https://ubuntu.com)]([https://ubuntu.com](https://ubuntu.com)) accessed on 7 June 2022) where we install our NDN implementation. From this base image, we created a container on each node (RSU/OBU), highlighted in red in Figure 4, and configured them to communicate with each other, both by IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi and by ITS-G5, in order to constitute a parallel and independent network.