Native versus Overlay-based NDN over Wi-Fi 6 for the Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a cornerstone building block of smart cities to provide better traffic safety and mobile infotainment. Recently, improved efficiency in WLAN-based dense scenarios has become widespread through Wi-Fi 6, a license-free spectrum technology that can complement the cellular-based infrastructure for IoV. In addition, Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising Internet architecture to accomplish content distribution in dynamic IoV scenarios. However, NDN deployments, i.e., native (clean-slate) and overlay (running on top of IP stack), require further investigation of their performance over wireless networks, particularly regarding the IoV scenario. This paper performs a comparative simulation-based study of these NDN deployments over Wi-Fi 6 for IoV using real vehicular traces. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort that extends ndnSIM 2 with an overlay-based NDN implementation and that compares it with the native approach. Results show that the overlay-based NDN consistently outperforms the native one, reaching around 99% of requests satisfied, against only 42.35% in the best case of native deployment.