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

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 The proposed scheme prevents the routing information from being abruptly outdated due to producer mobility.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.