IPv6-Based Vehicular Cloud Networking

In a vehicular cloud network, content-centric approaches are usually employed to seek contents. In the content-centric approaches, data attributes are used for routing instead of a specific address such as an IP address; i.e, data attributes are broadcasted in a vehicular cloud network to seek target contents. This flooding inevitably increases the cost of contents acquisition. To reduce the cost of contents acquisition, we propose an IPv6-based vehicular cloud network where IP-based unicast instead of content-centric broadcast is used to achieve contents acquisition. In this work, a new address structure is proposed to build the relationship between an IP address and a kind of contents, and via this new address contents can be acquired from the nearest vehicular cloud member in the unicast way. This scheme is analyzed and evaluated, and the data show that this scheme effectively reduces the cost of contents acquisition.