On the Design and Evaluation of Producer Mobility Management Schemes in Named Data Networks

Information-centric Networks (ICNs) offer a promising paradigm for the future Internet to cope with an ever increasing growth in data and shifts in access models. Different architectures of ICNs, including Named Data Networks (NDNs) are designed around content distribution, where data is the core entity in the network instead of hosts. One of the main challenges in NDNs is handling mobile content providers and maintaining seamless operation. Accordingly, attempts at handling mobility in NDNs have been proposed in the literature are mostly studied under simplistic and/or special cases. There is a lack of benchmarking tools to analyze and compare such schemes. This paper introduces a comprehensive assessment framework for mobility management schemes in NDNs, under varying topologies, heterogeneous producers and consumers, and different mobility models. We develop a generic and modular simulation environment in ns-3 that is made available for NDN researchers to evaluate their mobility management proposals. We implement and compare the performance of three mainstream Producer mobility management schemes, namely, the Mobility Anchor, Location Resolution and Hybrid approaches in NDNs. We demonstrate how mobility impacts NDN operation, specifically in terms of latency and delivery ratio. We also argue for the superior operation of the hybrid approach to handling mobility in NDNs, yet highlight its high control overhead.