GeoZone: An interest-packet forwarding mechanism based on dissemination zone for content-centric vehicular networks

In Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), applications like road traffic reports and free parking lots distribute the same content for a large number of nodes. To distribute those contents, VANET applications need to discover the content source address and establish an end-to-end route before the content retrieval begins. Highly dynamic topologies and the need to forward several flows requesting the same content towards the source in a broadcast medium turn these applications very challenging. In this work, we propose GeoZone, a content-centric framework that forwards requests using a geo-referenced naming scheme. GeoZone builds a dissemination zone with the requesting node GPS coordinates and the GPS coordinates of the content. The dissemination zone avoids requests flooding in the wireless medium. Simulation results show that GeoZone is able to reduce 66% the number of requests in the evaluated scenarios compared to another literature proposal without sacrificing delivery rate and delay.