Insights from the Experimentation of Named Data Networks in Mobile Wireless Environments

Abstract

The Information-Centric Network (ICN) paradigm has been touted as one of the candidates for the Internet of the future, where the Named Data Network (NDN) architecture is the one leading the way. Despite the large amount of works published in the literature targeting new implementations of such architecture, covering different network topologies and use cases, there are few NDN implementations in real networks. Moreover, most of these real-world NDN implementations, especially those addressing wireless and wired communication channels, are at a small scale, in laboratory environments. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an NDN-based implementation in a mobile wireless network, as part of a smart city infrastructure, making use of multiple wireless interfaces. We start by showing how we have implemented the NDN stack in current network nodes of the smart city infrastructure, following a hybrid solution where both TCP/IP and NDN paradigms can coexist. The implementation is evaluated in three scenarios, targeting different situations: mobility, the simultaneous use of different wireless interfaces and the network characteristics. The results show that our implementation works properly and insights about the correct NDN parameterization are derived.