An SDN-aided Information Centric Networking Approach to Publish-Subscribe with Mobile Consumers

Information Centric Networking represents a fundamental technology for the Future Internet. Its baseline functionalities can be extended to support publish-subscribe communication schema. But, in case of consumer mobility, its benefits slam against two main drawbacks. On one hand, available handover management solutions temporarily leave wrong forwarding information within network routers and do not take care of data dissemination across stale paths. On the other hand, mobile consumers inevitably lose content updates during the handover and definitively become unaware about the latest version of the content to request. By leveraging the potentials of the Software-Defined Network paradigm, this paper formulates new methodologies willing to solve these problems. Specifically, it proposes protocols for (1) dynamically updating forwarding functionalities through the control plane when the consumer detaches from the network and (2) restoring the synchronization between consumer and producer when the former one attaches to a new network attachment point. It addition, it develops preliminary analytical models for evaluating the average number of control information these protocols require to exchange per unit of time. The resulting analysis illustrates the pros and cons they achieve in different network configurations.