Supporting Seamless Mobility in Named Data Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures aim to replace current host-centric IP architecture with an information-centric one for efficient, secure, and reliable dissemination of information. ICN is built on several salient principles such as publish and subscribe paradigm, named content, in-network caching, and security over atomic information objects. These features allow a data chunk to be cached and retrieved from multiple nodes in the network, and can be validated without building a connection with its host. Though these tenets simplify the mobility problem in ICN, seamless mobility for real-time applications still demands a control plane. We propose three cross-layer network-assisted seamless mobility schemes: (1) point of attachment based, (2) rendezvous point based, and (3) multicast based, with the overall design objective of minimizing the loss of interests and data during a handoff scenario. This paper describes these schemes in named data networking (NDN) framework and discusses their trade-offs in terms of control and forwarding plane requirements.