A Novel Cloud Approach for Connected Vehicles

Cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITSs) are being deployed all around the world. Shortly, in addition to vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, buses, and all moving equipment will be compatible with C-ITS. These systems are connected through wireless local area networks based on WIFI IEEE 802.11p. The large number of C-ITSs and services will lead to a glut in the bandwidth of wireless networks. To overcome this limitation, we propose in this paper a new approach using the information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm which allows vehicles to communicate with the cloud environment. This scheme is denoted by vehicular central data networking (GeoVCDN). Our approach aims to reduce bandwidth consumption and improve data freshness by taking benefit from the existing application beacons and the geographical routing used by C-ITS actors. We have compared the performances (in terms of the network overhead and data freshness) of our solution to two other well-known ICN-based solutions. Each of them represents one of ICN categories, in particular, rendez-vous network (RENE) and named data networking (NDN). To do so, we have proposed a probabilistic model that allows us to evaluate the freshness and the load of the network. Furthermore, we have implemented these methods in a simulator. Our proposal outperforms the other methods in terms of network overhead and data freshness.