Seamless mobility in ICN for mobile consumers with mobile producers

In order to support seamless mobility in the Information- Centric Networking (ICN) Architecture we propose the Named-Node Network Architecture (3NA). 3NA introduces two independent namespaces to ICN, the 3N namespace used to uniquely identify nodes within a network and the Point of Attachment (PoA) namespace to identify a node's PoA to the network. The mappings between the two namespaces, along with all the necessary mechanisms to keep the mappings updated over time, are used when routing ICN packets to improve delay and the goodput when either the producer or the consumer are mobile. To support simultaneous producer and consumer mobility, we expand on the 3NA by adding a new Protocol Data Unit (PDU), the DU PDU. The DU PDU permits the encapsulation of ICN packets in a header that has source and destination name fields which belong to 3NA's 3N namespace. The new PDU permits seamless connectivity as long as 3NA's point of attachment signaling is strictly followed. We demonstrate the performance of the DU PDU against our previous defined communication methods and Named Data Networking's (NDN) Smart Flooding forwarding strategy using our open source nnnSIM module for the ns-3 framework. The new PDU outperforms all existing alternatives when the producer or both consumer and provider are mobile, obtaining overall lower mean network delay and higher median goodput.