Recently, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has attracted much attention in part because of its promising future as next-generation Internet architecture. While ICN is scalable and efficient in the Internet, it raises concerns when deployed in a mobile large scale network like the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). For example, conventional ICN techniques do not work well in the intermittent VANET connectivity. Moreover, current ICN proposal strictly follows a receiver-driven transport design. However, many applications in multi-hop adhoc networks are push-based and require fast communications. ICN's pull-based transport in such cases is underperforming and costly. Finally, the inefficiency introduced by ICN default anycast may backfire without careful design.

In this study, we introduce Information-Centric Ad-hoc Network (ICAN), an efficient, flexible, and adaptive ICN architecture supporting both pull and push transport and contextaware, multi-hop and disruption-tolerant communications all in one system.