A Mobility Link Service for NDN Consumer Mobility

Named Data Networking (NDN) supports the consumer mobility service by letting a consumer reissue an interest. This method is straightforward, but it may cause several drawbacks, including unnecessary handover overhead and long handover delay. We concentrate on the NDN communication model in which the pair of an interest and a data packet is considered a single communication working set (i.e., transaction unit). In this respect, reissuing an interest means creating a new transaction due to the connection damaged by the movement of a consumer. It makes all states of the current transaction useless, and this is where the drawbacks arise. In order to enhance the consumer mobility service, we propose Mobility Link Service (MLS) operated in NDN face which is responsible for management of a connection for a transaction. MLS reuses the existing states of a transaction by establishing a connection for the transaction instead of creating a new one. In addition, MLS in NDN face makes consumer mobility service transparent to the NDN forwarding plane. Therefore, the consumer mobility service and the NDN architecture can evolve independently. The performance evaluation shows that MLS reduces the amount of retransmitted data and handover latency compared with the existing NDN mobility solution.