Information-Centric Mobile Networks: A Survey, Discussion, and Future Research Directions

Information-centric networking (ICN) and its fruition, the named data networking (NDN) is a paradigm shift from host-centric address-based communication architecture to the content-centric name-based one. ICN intends to resolve various major issues faced by today’s internet architecture such as privacy, security, consistent routing, and mobility, to name a few. With the massive increase of mobile data traffic in today’s era, mobility is one of the major concerns in networking. On the one hand, ICN realization i.e., the NDN follows a pull-based communication model and natively supports the consumer (end-user) mobility in wired networks by maintaining the forwarding states on intermediate nodes. Nevertheless, the mobile consumer nodes confront issues in wireless networking environments such as excessive energy consumption as a result of request flooding, content retrieval delays due to intermittent connectivity, and bandwidth consumption due to the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium, among others. The producer (content-generator) mobility, on the other hand, was not initially supported in the original architectural design of NDN for both wired and wireless networks. Therefore, to efficiently address the degradation issues incurred by mobile consumer/producer nodes, a plethora of mobility management schemes have been proposed over the recent few years. In this paper, we provided a detailed survey on the existing research efforts—in the context of producer, consumer, and hybrid mobility, that have been proposed in the literature. Moreover, we outlined various research directions considering the role of mobility in futuristic technologies such as artificial intelligence-enabled smart networks, software-defined networking, edge computing, vehicular-fog computing, autonomous driving, semantic communication, and resource-constrained Internet of Things.