Handling Producer and Consumer Mobility in IoT Publish–Subscribe Named Data Networks

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a standard facet of modern communications, and information-centric networks have been pointed as an alternative to bypass the restrictions imposed by the traditional Internet protocol networks regarding the mobility of its network elements. However, the improvements imposed by this new paradigm fall short in large scale mobile wireless distributed environments inherent to IoT, due to high node mobility, dynamic topologies and intermittent connectivity. To tackle these issues, we present a named data network (NDN)-based publish–subscribe mechanism with support for both Consumer and Producer mobility. This approach handles the Producer mobility by combining the Data packets with infrastructure specific information, fixing the broken paths between the Producer and the Consumer; and the Consumer mobility by monitoring and anticipating mobile node trajectories while compelling the infrastructure to adjust to new paths. Simulation results, assuming a smart city use case and using real traces of vehicular mobility, have shown that the proposed solution far surpasses the native NDN workflow and traditional publish–subscribe solutions. With respect to the Producer mobility, the proposed solution delivers 79% of Data packets against 14% with the Native implementation, when using 25 mobile Producers; regarding the Consumer mobility, results have shown that our solution achieves almost the same Consumer satisfaction ratio as previous implementations but reducing substantially the network overhead related with the transmission of Interest packets.