Dynamic ring for seamless mobility in identity centric networks

Identity centric networks (IdCN), in which packets are destined to user identities, is one of the future network architectures under discussion. Since user mobility is already widely observed in the current Internet and seen as one of the main features of the future Internet, seamless mobility needs to be kept in mind for whatever routing mechanisms developed for IdCN. However, seamless handoff techniques from the IP world won't work because no Care-of-Address or the alike is available in IdCN to help quickly locating the mobile user's new position, therefore it is difficult to redirect the packets in transit before the routing protocol re-finds the moved users. In this paper a dynamic ring mechanism that does not rely on but can work with any IdCN routing protocol is proposed to support seamless handoff in IdCN. During a handoff, the mobile user makes use of this ring to keep its global connectivity, and leaves after the handoff finishes. Appropriate timing of hooking to and leaving the ring is crucial to keep the overhead at minimum. Experiments show that the proposed mechanism can indeed prevent most packet drops and keep the flow running during handoffs at reasonably lower cost than simple retransmission.