Towards Predictive Forwarding Strategy in Vehicular Named Data Networking

Vehicular named data networking (V-NDN) is promising to improve the content delivery efficiency in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the potential broadcast storm caused by Interest packet flooding and return path failures caused by vehicle mobility can significantly degrade the content delivery performance. Existing forwarding strategies based on outdated position information cannot address these issues well. In this paper, we propose a novel predictive forwarding strategy (PRFS) for V-NDN. In PRFS, long short-term memory (LSTM) is employed to amend the neighbor table (NBT) for preciser neighboring vehicles' positions. In addition, the next-hop forwarder is selected among the neighbors, taking into account the link reliability and the distance along the road (DR) in both directions. Furthermore, a new mechanism is designed to notify the selected next-hop forwarder by embedding the forwarder identity in the Interest packet header, so as to accelerate the forwarding process. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out, and experimental results demonstrate that PRFS can reduce the number of forwarded Interest packets and data packets by 21.29% and 25.75%, respectively, and improve the success ratio of satisfied Interest packets by 35.1% compared to the existing baseline algorithms.