Proactive Caching for Enhancing User-Side Mobility Support in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is designed for efficient content dissemination. Several researches are carried out for NDN recently, but the user-side mobility problem is not considered sufficiently. To enhance seamless user-side mobility support in the NDN architecture, we propose a Proactive Caching approach for NDN (PCNDN), which is based on the idea that proactively requests and caches the content items that a user does not receive but were requested before a handover process. Thus, once the user reconnects to the network, it can immediately fetch the content items that were transmitted during its disconnection period. Compared with the original NDN, the analytical and simulation results indicate that the proposed approach has lower handover cost, higher delivery ratio and shorter handover latency. Moreover, the proposed approach prevents unnecessary packet losses on the path towards the old location of the user, alleviates negative effects of user-side mobility on real-time services.