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, innetwork 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.