A Dual-Connectivity Mobility Link Service for Producer Mobility in the Named Data Networking

Abstract

With the exponential growth of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure has evolved from built-in static infrastructure to a flexible structure applicable to various mobile environments. In this Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) environment, each IoT device could operate simultaneously as a provider and consumer of information, and could provide new services through the exchange of such information. Named Data Networking (NDN), which could request data by content name rather than location (IP address), is suitable for such mobile IoT environments. However, in the current Named Data Networking (NDN) specification, producer mobility is one of the major problems in need of remedy. Previously proposed schemes for producer mobility use an anchor to hide the producer’s movement from consumers. As a result, they require a special anchor node and a signaling procedure to track the current locations of contents. A few anchorless schemes have also been proposed, but they still require mobility signaling and all NDN routers on the signaling path must understand the meaning of the signaling. We therefore propose an anchorless producer mobility scheme for the NDN. This scheme uses a dual-connectivity strategy that can be expressed as a soft handover. Whenever a producer changes its NDN Access Router (NAR), the new mobility link service located on the mobile producer’s old NDN face repairs the old link so that the connectivity with the pNAR can be maintained for a while. The old NDN face is removed after the new location information on the contents of the producer is disseminated over the NDN network by the Named-data Link State Routing Protocol (NLSR) routing protocol at the nNAR. The new mobility link service decouples connection and transaction to hide the collapse of the link. Therefore, the NDN’s mobility procedure could be simplified as the handover is defined as transaction completion as opposed to a breakdown of links. The proposed scheme prevents the routing information from being abruptly outdated due to producer mobility. Our simulation results show seamless handover when the producer changes its default access router.

Convergence of Information-Centric Networks and Edge Intelligence for IoV: Challenges and Future Directions

“…Producer mobility is more complicated since the NDN naming scheme does not include location information. A number of studies, such as those of [111][112][113][114][115], address producer mobility. Four producer mobility approaches have been presented in the literature: location resolution, triangular, locator/identifier separation, and routing-based.…”

“…However, such an approach causes suboptimal routing problems and signaling overhead. In the anchor-less scheme [112], mobile producers send special announcements to the previously contacted NDN access router (NAR) whenever it changes the point of attachment.…”

OPMSS: Optimal Producer Mobility Support Solution for Named Data Networking

“…Due to the relevance and important features of NDN for mobility support of the field Internet-of-Things [34], vehicular Internet-of-Things (VIoT) [35] and Internet-of-Things Cloud (IoTC) [15], it employs the NDN architecture for the solution of data retrieval and node mobility. Wang [15] proved that deploying NDN in IoT is quite challenging, due to the different architectures and working mechanisms and the effective mobility support strategies in NDN being lacking.…”

“…Recently, a number of producer mobility schemes were proposed as in [34]. The solution is an NDN producer mobility scheme that requires no use of anchor; there is no need to announce the producer's movement to the nodes over NDN architecture and the scheme does not modify the current NDN router.…”

“…It exchanges a pair of data and interest packets during a normal transaction. The proposed scheme support producer mobility introduces a dual connectivity to both hide the link breakage to the NDN, and a new NDN link service is created separately which is called the producer mobility link service (PMLS), which is used to repair the old link so that the connectivity with the previous NAR can be maintained and force the router to buffer the interests arriving during the movement transition period, forwarding them to the producer after the completion of the handoff [34]. However, in the process of buffering the interest packets, latency and signaling will be high before the old link is repaired due to the exchange of update and status messages other than normal interest packages.…”