Abstract The focus of the research for big data analytics for sustainability (BDAS) is Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs), since it has become the most popular technology for the researchers, academia and the organizations. However, in VANETs most part of the time a well-defined path from a consumer to the provider does not exist due to the intermittent connectivity and mobility. Hence, Vehicular Content Centric Networks (VCCNs) has been proposed and has emerged as a future Internet technology. The focus of the VCCNs is to retrieve and distribute the content faster than the existing Internet architecture in vehicular environment. In VCCNs, the consumer broadcasts the interest packet to the provider, including the name of the required content. If the provider is available at one hop neighbour, the interest packet is sent to the provider. The provider generates the data packet and sends back to the consumer. Otherwise, the neighbour vehicle becomes the forwarder vehicle who receives the interest packet from the consumer and searches in its cache called Content Storage (CS). If the content is not available in its storage, the forwarder vehicle rebroadcasts the interest packet within its vicinity forwards the interest packet to the provider. The provider generates the data packet including the content and sends back to the consumer through the selected forwarder vehicle. The VCCNs communication paradigm faces several challenges i.e., mobility, interest broadcast storm, routing, interest or data packet forwarding and forwarder selection. Various routing protocols have already been proposed and implemented in order to resolve the existing problems. However, due to the high mobility and the dynamic network topology in vehicular environment, there is no assurance that the back path is still available followed by the interest message which causes disconnected link problem. Hence, the retrieval of the required data might be effected. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a forwarding protocol to mitigating the interest broadcast storm and the disconnected link problems, keeping in the view of intermittent connectivity and high mobility that will improve the data delivery probability, packet loss ratio, Interest Satisfaction Ratio (ISR) and average End-to-End delay in a highway and an urban scenario of a vehicular environment. Results and demonstrations show that the proposed protocol meets all the requirements for BDAS.