A New Perspective on Mobility Support

As the number of mobile users proliferates, there is an ever increasing demand for Internet mobility support to meet the applications’ need. Although years of research on IP mobility support has produced a rich literature of solutions, few of them are widely adopted. Concerns regarding the existing solutions range from inflexible communication models to weak security measures. Furthermore, these solutions are based on the assumption that a mobile node is always connected to the infrastructure, and its movement only results in different connecting points. In reality, however, mobility often leads to intermittent connectivity (e.g., vehicles on the road) or opportunistic ad hoc connectivity among a set of mobile nodes. In this paper, we align mobility support with the data-centric nature of applications in Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and provide a new perspective on mobility support that addresses the weakness in the existing IP mobility solutions as well as utilizes lessons learned.