Mobility support in wireless content centric networks

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) has been recently proposed as an alternative to traditional IP based networking. In CCN, content is accessed by content name instead of a host identifier (locational identifier). While contents are delivered to users, their copies are cached in the network and reused for later access to those contents. This new type of networking disseminates content rapidly and efficiently. For practical use of CCN, many networking issues are actively researched, and new types of CCN components are designed. Mobility is one of the essential parts of the CCN architecture, and many researchers consider it as a significant challenge. However, there have not been sufficient reports on it yet. In this thesis, we therefore address fundamental mobility issues, such as seamless handover, optimal path selection, network mobility, and handling of persistent interests under infrastructure wireless environments. And we also consider a routing problem in mobile ad-hoc environments from the point of new networking concept. For each issue, we propose practical solutions that align to a CCN environment. To ensure seamless handoff, especially, we propose various handoff schemes, and compare their performance in terms of handoff latency and overhead by using packet-level simulation. In order to develop a routing protocol for CCN enabled mobile ad-hoc network, we firstly analyse and compare the performance of broadcast and unicast delivery. Our analysis proves that constraints in the MAC layer limit the benefits of broadcast delivery. Rather, the delivery ratio, delay, and energy efficiency become much worse in broadcast delivery unless a topological change incurs too much flooding overhead in unicast delivery. Based on this observation, we present a novel energy efficient content distribution scheme that delivers the content in a unicast manner while minimizing flooding overhead by taking advantage of ICN features. Via ns-3 simulation, we show that the proposed...