Transparent consumer mobility management in named data networking under the push communication mode

Media streaming and consumer mobility are already prevalent on the internet. Audio and video streaming traffic continues to grow and currently accounts for over 70% of global traffic. User mobility has become a necessity due to the very rapid proliferation of smart phones and mobile devices. Mobility has become a basic premise of network communications and requires effective native integration into future and 5G networks. The Named Data Network (NDN) is designed to be a connections-less pull based communication architecture, although media streaming is better served using a push data communication mode. In addition, no provision has been made in NDN to manage consumer mobility. Consumer mobility is a challenging open issue in such a push mode of communication which establishes persistent paths between mobile consumers and streaming servers. In this article, we propose three anchorless approaches for transparent management of consumer mobility in NDN operating under the push communication mode. The proposed approaches are implemented in the de facto NDN simulator (NdnSIM), which made it possible to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis to ascertain and compare the efficiency and effectiveness of these approaches.