Realization of VANET-Based Cloud Services through Named Data Networking

Connected car technology (also referred to as VANET) has gradually paved its way to legislation in several countries and soon will be followed by mass-scale deployment. However, the race between the advancements in technologies and utilization of the available resources have left a question mark on the future of pure VANET. Therefore, the research community together with academia and industry have foreseen the evolution of VANET into VANET-based clouds. The data- or content-centric communication paradigm is the point of convergence in these technologies because the content is shared among different nodes in different forms such as infotainment or safety. However, the current IP-based networking is not an ideal choice for content-centric applications because of its larger overhead for establishing, maintaining, and securing the path, addressing complexity, non-scalability for content, routing and mobility management overhead, and so on. Therefore, the limitations and shortcomings of current IP-based networking and the need for efficient content delivery advocate for a paradigm shift. To this end, a new content-centric networking paradigm, namely NDN, has been employed to address the aforementioned issues related to content-centric networking while using IP-based networking. In this article, we foresee the integration of VANET-based clouds with NDN called NDN-VC for reliable, efficient, robust, and safe intelligent transportation systems. We particularly aim at the architecture and concise naming mechanism for NDN-VC. Furthermore, we also outline the unique future challenges faced by the NDN-VC.