Information-Centric Mobile Networks: A Survey, Discussion, and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Information-centric networking (ICN) and its fruition, the named data networking (NDN) is a paradigm shift from host-centric address-based communication architecture to the content-centric namebased one. ICN intends to resolve various major issues faced by today's internet architecture such as privacy, security, consistent routing, and mobility, to name a few. With the massive increase of mobile data traffic in today's era, mobility is one of the major concerns in networking. On the one hand, ICN realization i.e., the NDN follows a pull-based communication model and natively supports the consumer (end-user) mobility in wired networks by maintaining the forwarding states on intermediate nodes. Nevertheless, the mobile consumer nodes confront issues in wireless networking environments such as excessive energy consumption as a result of request flooding, content retrieval delays due to intermittent connectivity, and bandwidth consumption due to the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium, among others. The producer (contentgenerator) mobility, on the other hand, was not initially supported in the original architectural design of NDN for both wired and wireless networks. Therefore, to efficiently address the degradation issues incurred by mobile consumer/producer nodes, a plethora of mobility management schemes have been proposed over the recent few years. In this paper, we provided a detailed survey on the existing research efforts-in the context of producer as well as consumer mobility, that have been proposed in the literature. Moreover, we outlined various research directions considering the role of mobility in futuristic technologies such as artificial intelligence-enabled smart networks, edge computing, software-defined networking, vehicular-fog computing, autonomous driving, and resource-constrained Internet of Things.INDEX TERMS Named data networking, mobility management, producer mobility, wireless networking, artificial intelligence, edge computing, vehicular fog computing, autonomous driving. I. INTRODUCTIONT HE 21st century is experiencing immense growth in the production of data 1 as the result of the adaptation of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision in almost every walk of life [1]- [4]. The produced data is shared by enabling the communication between two parties: 1) the producer node, which could be a resource-rich server device on the Internet or resource-constrained sensor node in wireless sensor 1 We use Data with a uppercase "D" to refer to ICN/NDN Data packet whereas data with lowercase "d" refer to general data. networks (WSNs), among others, and 2) the consumer node, which could be an end-user using a mobile application on a smartphone, browsing a website on a laptop, or a base station in the WSNs environment. Due to the heavy data production in real-time scenarios, the current internet architecture and other existing wireless networking environments such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), and WSNs, are facing significant challenges specifically when the ...