Mobility-aware Software-Defined Service-Centric Networking

Future Internet applications, such as the vehicular use cases, impose requirements that challenge current networking paradigms. Hence, other networking paradigms have been proposed, such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN), aiming to change network management and operation fundamentals to meet those requirements. Leveraging these networking paradigms, in this paper we present the Mobility-aware Service-Centric Networking (MSCN), an ICN-inspired solution to mitigate mobility-related networking issues by focusing on service provisioning rather than content. Due to the requirement of installing specialized hardware, ICN-based solutions face adoption issues. Still, SDN features can be used to emulate ICN behaviour without the requirement for deployment of new infrastructure. Therefore, we present an SDN-based implementation of MSCN (SD-MSCN), which relies on already installed SDN-enabled switches and the OpenFlow protocol. We evaluate the performance of our proposal by comparing SD-MSCN with other SDN-enabled ICN and IP protocols. Simulations show that our proposal outperforms IP-based solutions in the presence of user mobility events. Nevertheless, it is possible to produce proactive IP-based solutions that achieve similar performance as our proposal. However, our proposal has a significantly better performance than IP-based solutions in environments with frequent service mobility events.