A Survey of Mobile Information-Centric Networking: Research Issues and Challenges

Recently, a series of innovative information-centric networking (ICN) architectures have been designed to better address the shift from host-centric end-to-end communication to requester-driven content retrieval. With the explosive increase of mobile data traffic, the mobility issue in ICN is a growing concern and a number of approaches have been proposed to deal with the mobility problem in ICN. Despite the potential advantages of ICN in mobile wireless environments, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before its widespread deployment, including consistent routing, local cached content discovery, energy efficiency, privacy, security and trust, and practical deployment. In this paper, we present a brief survey on some of the works that have already been done to achieve mobile ICN, and discuss some research issues and challenges. We identify several important aspects of mobile ICN: overview, mobility enabling technologies, information-centric wireless mobile networks, and research challenges.

I. Introduction

With the explosive growth of the mobile data traffic, mobile hosts will exceed wired ones in terms of numbers and traffic load, which makes host mobility a long-standing challenge in the existing Internet architecture [1]. As reported in [2], global mobile data traffic will increase 11-fold from 2013 to 2018. By 2018, fixed devices will contribute to 39 percent of IP traffic, while the rest of IP traffic will be brought about by WiFi and mobile devices. Therefore, the increasingly mobile traffic has led to an emerging trend of addressing “mobility” problem of the Internet.