Caching Transient Contents in Vehicular Named Data Networking: A Performance Analysis

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising communication paradigm for the challenging vehicular ad hoc environment. In particular, the built-in pervasive caching capability was shown to be essential for effective data delivery in presence of short-lived and intermittent connectivity. Existing studies have however not considered the fact that multiple vehicular contents can be transient, i.e., they expire after a certain time period since they were generated, the so-called FreshnessPeriod in NDN. In this paper, we study the effects of caching transient contents in Vehicular NDN and present a simple yet effective freshness-driven caching decision strategy that vehicles can implement autonomously. Performance evaluation in ndnSIM shows that the FreshnessPeriod is a crucial parameter that deeply influences the cache hit ratio and, consequently, the data dissemination performance.