RapidVFetch: Rapid Downloading of Named Data via Distributed V2V Communication

As the world becomes increasingly online, vehicular networking is becoming a reality. Vehicular networks require asynchronous, secure, and high-performance data transfers. TCP/IP networking, which is designed for infrastructure-based and synchronous communication, does not match vehicular networks well. Therefore, there has been an increased recognition that vehicular networking can be better served by a data-centric networking model. This paper contributes to this new recognition by proposing RapidVFetch, an infrastructure-to-vehicle data downloading protocol based on Named Data Networking (NDN). RapidVFetch leverages V2V communication over NDN for data requesters to initiate a prefetching process that does not require any centralized component for content preallocation and is transparent to the infrastructure. At the same time, RapidVFetch utilizes NDN's built-in data-centric security support to ensure the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of downloaded data. Our evaluation results from simulations show that, assuming available neighbor vehicles, RapidVFetch can greatly improve data downloading performance by prefetching data at desired locations and can provide network stability by fetching data directly from other vehicles.