ECRA: An Encounter-aware and Clustering-based Routing Algorithm for Information-centric VANETs

The vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have recently received much attention. However, the efficiency of network transmission is low because of the dynamic characteristics. To improve transmission performance, many studies introduce Content Centric Networks (CCN) into VANETs forming information-centric VANETs. Due to dynamic of network topology, the efficient design of data transmission is a great challenge. In this paper, we propose the encounter-aware and clustering-based routing algorithm (ECRA) for information-centric VANETs. The awareness of encounter allows vehicles to record the movement track of other vehicles to find the destination node quickly. The clustering can better manage data exchange among nodes in urban traffic networks. The cluster heads exchange historical encounter information (e.g., encounter node, encounter time and encounter location) with each other to maintain a g-ECRA table, which is used to determine the position of the next anchor. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of ECRA in information-centric VANETs.