Toward Infotainment Services in Vehicular Named Data Networking: A Comprehensive Framework Design and Its Realization

Providing various infotainment services is essential for improving road safety and the overall driving experience in vehicular networks. However, supporting such services in vehicular named data networking (VNDN) environments poses significant challenges due to data broadcast phenomenon, vehicle mobility, and diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This paper proposes a first comprehensive framework covering data packet format/infotainment service categorization, queuing policy, adaptive forwarding, and mobility management in order to offer overall insight into infotainment services in VNDN. We introduce a class identifier in the data packet format to indicate the class of infotainment data into critical information, non-critical information, and entertainment categories. Advanced push-based data forwarding and Enhanced pull-based data forwarding schemes are proposed to adaptively serve information and entertainment data, respectively. For better seamless mobility and handover support, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based vehicle location estimation technique is proposed. Enhanced Weighted Fair Queuing (EWFQ) is adapted for priority-based data forwarding. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves infotainment delivery in highly dynamic VNDN environments compared to legacy fragment schemes. Our proposed framework demonstrates performance improvements in various key metrics compared to legacy fragment VNDN schemes. Specifically, our framework reduced the redundant data packets by 15-25%, latency by 7-10%, and increased data delivery by 15-18% under dynamic vehicular scenarios. Lastly, the paper systematically addresses issues for comprehensive infotainment services in the VNDN environment, based on lessons learned mostly from our framework design, and their challenges for better infotainment services.