DT-ICAN: A Disruption-Tolerant Information-Centric Ad-Hoc Network

Recently, Information-Centric Network (ICN) has been attracting much attention with its promising future as next-generation Internet architecture. While ICN is scalable and efficient in Internet, concerns are raised when ICN is deployed in frequently-disruptive vehicular ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we introduce DT-ICAN, which provides low-cost, bandwidth-efficient network operations to conquer disruptions while preserving the context awareness of ICN. We implement DT-ICANSIM, an open-source simulator for DT-ICAN in QualNet. We evaluate the trade-off between the performance gain in data availability and the overhead due to epidemic dissemination using real-world traces. Our results show that DT-ICAN improves the file retrieval rate by 45% compared to traditional multi-hop ICN in real-world scenario, proving the necessity of providing an opportunistic networking option when end-to-end connectivity is unavailable for VANET ICN.