Named Data Networking (NDN), an extension of the Content-centric network (CCN), is not an unfamiliar word. It is considered as one of the promising future network architecture. NDN focuses on naming the content regardless of end-to-end device addresses. NDN has been adopted for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), and it has promising results. Though NDN has robust architecture, many challenges still exist, including consumer and producer mobility, naming, and Interest and data packet flooding. In vehicular NDN, the consumer vehicle broadcasts an Interest packet for the required content. The producer vehicle or an intermediate vehicle that contains the required content in its cache replies with the data packet after receiving the Interest packet. The data packet reaches the consumer vehicle via simple broadcasting. This data broadcast creates congestion in the network and needs to be mitigated. In this work, we coin a new term called name centrality, and using it along with received signal strength, we have proposed a novel scheme to control data broadcast storm in vehicular NDN. The scheme uses the mentioned two parameters to allow only a subset of potential forwarding vehicles to rebroadcast the data packet instead of all the vehicles which receive the data packets. This reduces the copies of data packets processed and propagated in the network and hence alleviates congestion. The scheme is evaluated through extensive simulation under different scenarios, and it outperforms the legacy schemes. The comparison has been made in terms of copies of total data packets processed, Interest satisfaction delay, and Interest satisfaction rate. Compared to other approaches, the proposed scheme reduced the average copies of data packets processed by 55% and 20% with varying Interest packet rates and 58% and 19% with varying vehicle speed.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is one of the promising solutions that cater to the challenges of IP-based networking. ICN shifts the IP-based access model to a data-centric model. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a flexible ICN architecture, which is based on content distribution considering data as the core entity rather than IP-based hosts. User-generated mobile contents for real-time multimedia communication such as Internet telephony are very common these days and are increasing both in quality and quantity. In NDN, producer mobility is one of the challenging problems to support uninterrupted real-time multimedia communication and needs to be resolved for the adoption of NDN as future Internet architecture. We assert that mobile node’s future location prediction can aid in designing efficient anchor-less mobility management techniques. In this article, we show how location prediction techniques can be used to provide an anchor-less mobility management solution in order to ensure seamless handover of the producer during real-time multimedia communication. The results indicate that with a low level of location prediction accuracy, our proposed methodology still profoundly reduces the total handover latency and round trip time without creating network overhead.

Managing queuing delays is crucial for maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) in real-time media communications. Customizing traditional routing protocols to meet specific QoS requirements—particularly in terms of minimizing delay and jitter for real-time media—can be both complex and time-intensive. Furthermore, these protocols often encounter challenges when adapted for vendor-specific hardware implementations. To address these issues, this paper leverages the programmable features of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to simplify the process of achieving user-defined QoS, bypassing the limitations of traditional routing protocols. In this work, we propose a policy-based routing module that integrates with traditional routing protocols to ensure QoS for real-time media flows. QoS is achieved by rerouting the flow along a new low-latency path calculated by the proposed module when the queuing delay exceeds a certain threshold. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution significantly enhances the performance of traditional routing protocols within an SDN framework, effectively reducing the average end-to-end delay by 80% and total packet loss by 73%, while also improving jitter and alleviating network congestion.

Congestion in the network is a persistent issue that is becoming more challenging with the advent of technologies such as metaverse and immersive AR/VR applications. Therefore, we propose Enhanced ECN (EECN), a novel network-assisted congestion feedback protocol that redesigns the legacy ECN. EECN notifies two congestion levels encoded in the existing two ECN bits, unlike ECN which delivers only Boolean information about the congestion. Additionally, we propose a congestion control algorithm that leverages this multilevel congestion feedback from the network using EECN. Our proposed EECN feedback mechanism can coexist with the legacy ECN and requires minimal changes in the end hosts. Moreover, the proposed congestion control mechanism reduces packet drops by 74% compared to ECN with TCP New Reno and 96% compared to TCP New Reno without ECN. The marked packets are reduced by 30% compared to ECN. Furthermore, the proposed approach enhances the flow completion time of short-lived network flows.