PMNDN: Proxy Based Mobility Support Approach in Mobile NDN Environment

In this paper, we study the source mobility problem that exists in the current named data networking (NDN) architecture and propose a proxy-based mobility support approach named PMNDN to overcome the problem. PMNDN proposes using a proxy to efficiently manage source mobility. Besides, functionalities of the NDN access routers are extended to track the mobility status of a source and signal Proxy about a handoff event. With this design, a mobile source does not need to participate in handoff signaling which reduces the consumption of limited wireless bandwidth. PMNDN also features an ID that is structurally similar to the content name so that routing scalability of NDN architecture is maintained and addressing efficiency of Interest packets is improved. We illustrate the performance advantages of our proposed solution by comparing the handoff performance of the mobility support approaches with that in NDN architecture and current Internet architecture via analytical and simulation investigation. We show that PMNDN offers lower handoff cost, shorter handoff latency, and less packet losses during the handoff process.