Preference-aware Fast Interest Forwarding for video streaming in information-centric VANETs

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) focuses on data dissemination instead of host communication, and it is a promising solution for video streaming in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). In Information-Based VANETs, content copies can be cached by arbitrary mobile nodes in the networks. Thus, it is required to optimize the routing of content requests (referred to as Interest packets) in order to quickly locate potential content providers as soon as possible. This article proposes a Preference-aware Fast Interest Forwarding for video streaming in ICN-based VANETs (PaFF). In PaFF, each mobile user creates a Highly Preferred Content Table (HPCT) to maintain the content caching status of nodes who have similar mobility patterns and video playback behavior. Based on HPCT, a preference-aware forwarder selection mechanism is proposed to select the next hop of Interest packets in order to minimize latencies and maximize reliability. Simulation results show that PaFF achieves a considerable improvement in terms of start-up delay and cache hit ratio while incurring almost the same overhead with respect to state-of-art solutions.