Mobility support for content source in content-centric networking

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) is rising to solve the problems suffered by traditional networks, especially in terms of content delivery. One of the critical issues for basic CCN is supporting mobility. Handoff of Mobile Content Source (MCS) will result in a large scale routing update, which generates huge amount of routing overhead and leads to service interruption. Most of the existing CCN mobility mechanisms are transplanted from the IP mobility solutions, which are unnaturally integrated with CCN. Different from previous works, a mobility strategy from the perspective of CCN architecture is proposed to support the handoff of MCS in this paper. Especially, we define the critical network routers that can limit the routing update scale effectively when MCS handoff is conducted. Based on the defined critical network routers, the proposed scheme can provide lower routing update overhead, faster routing convergence and shorter service interruption time. Finally, series of simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.