A Survey of Mobility in Information-Centric Networks: Challenges and Research Directions

In essence, an information-centric network is one which supports a content request/reply model. One proposed benefit of this is improved mobility. This can refer to provider, consumer or content mobility. Despite this, little specific research has yet looked into the effectiveness of this new paradigm at handling mobility. This paper presents a survey of some of the key ICN technologies, alongside their individual approaches to mobility. Through this, we highlight some of the promising benefits of ICN, before discussing important future research questions that must be answered. this paper, we focus on two types of mobile networks:1 · Internet-based mobility: Mobile nodes connect to (multiple) Access Points (APs), changing their AP as their position changes. Note that an AP can be represented by a Base Station, a WiFi AP etc. · Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs): Mobile nodes collaborate to build shared routing information, allowing message exchange between each other, as well as potentially external parties (via an AP). Handling the above mobility has been a significant challenge that has plagued location-oriented networks (e.g. IP) due to the complexity of managing changes in a node's geographic and topological location -- a situation that was never anticipated when the principles of packet networking were first defined. Various `bolt-on' protocols have been defined to enable mobility, including Mobile IP [2] and the Host Identification Protocol [3], however, often these complicate existing protocols and suffer from limited deployment.