Design and analysis of a transport-level solution for content-centric VANETs

Vehicular networks, characterized by dynamic, short-lived and spotty connectivity, challenge the design of reliable and efficient content delivery protocols. By leveraging content names instead of IP addresses and by enabling in-network caching, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) reveals to be a promising paradigm for content retrieval and distribution on the road. The CCN architecture defines new operations to transfer named data objects, including naming, security, routing and transport schemes, that need proper design choices and deserve further investigation. In this paper, we focus on reliability issues addressed at the transport-level of a CCN architecture properly customized to be deployed on top of the IEEE 802.11p access technology in VANETs. After analysing the benefits of a segmentation/reassembly procedure to transfer named data objects, we design a scheme to manage retransmissions of lost content packets. We assess the effects of our proposed transport function on the content download performance and the usage of channel resources.