Anchor-Chain: A Seamless Producer Mobility Support Scheme in NDN

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) has natural advantages in the consumer mobility support for its design characteristics, while the producer mobility support was left unspecified. Some producer mobility support schemes have been proposed in recent years, which better solved the huge overhead caused by the route aggregation in normal NDN, yet critical issues like long handover latency and high packet loss rate still remain. In this paper, we improved and optimized a quite popular method anchor-based solution by setting multi-level anchor nodes strategically based on the network topology hierarchy, which we called Anchor-Chain, and the Interest packet forwarded to the producer would pass through it. After the producer moved, the newly generated Anchor-Chain would reuse the previous forwarding path as far as possible to guide more Interests to the new location of producer and reduce the Interest packets drop rate. Besides, we introduce a mobility preprocess mechanism that takes the advantage of connectionless and multi-path forwarding in NDN to establish the future Interest forwarding path in advance, which assists the producer performs seamless handover. By numerical analysis, our approach can reduce the handover latency and improve the response ratio compared with the main current solutions.