Mobile Sources in an Information-Centric Network with Hierarchical Names: An Indirection Approach

An increasing amount of information is available from mobile devices. We consider the problem of retrieving data from mobile sources in an information-centric network architecture called Named Data Networking. We propose an approach in which indirection points locally map requests for persistent data names to requests for temporary location names that reflects the sources’ current network attachment points. The approach does not require cooperation from intermediate routers or requesting nodes, and supports multi-homing, soft hand-overs, and networks of mobile sources. The inherent route stretch problem is mitigated by serving cached data from the indirection points. An initial evaluation shows that our approach reduces retrieval time and load on mobile sources in case of repeated requests, compared to an approach that uses a global distributed naming database to look up mobile sources’ locations.