A Softwarized and MEC-Enabled Protocol Architecture Supporting Consumer Mobility in Information-Centric Networks

Information-Centric Networking emerged as a powerful enabling technology for the provisioning of scalable and efficient real-time services in Future Internet, mobile architectures, and multi-hop wireless mesh networks. To serve mobile consumers, most of scientific contributions suggest to extend the information-centric communication primitives by means of a pull-based methodology, according to which the mobile consumer issues pending requests every time it reaches a new network attachment point. This approach, however, generates two important shortcomings. First, the requests delivered before the handover will generate stale paths with wrong forwarding information in their network routers. As a consequence, some new contents will be delivered also to previous locations, thus wasting bandwidth. Second, during handovers, mobile consumers may miss some contents released in real-time and lose the synchronization with the remote producer. In order to solve these issues, this work conceives a novel protocol architecture that successfully integrates and properly customizes the key functionalities of Information-Centric Networking, Multi-access Edge Computing, and Software Defined Networking paradigms. Specifically, the designed approach envisages that (1) Multi-access Edge Computing assists mobile consumers in retrieving data, while transparently managing the information-centric communication primitives and recovering the synchronization with the remote producer after the handover, (2) Software-Defined Controllers dynamically configure forwarding functionalities, and (3) Information-Centric Networking enables efficient data dissemination and delivers network control instructions. The impact of the devised protocol architecture on the communication overhead is analytically formulated and evaluated in scenarios with different topology, mobility, application settings, and number of mobile consumers. The comparison with respect to the pure Information-Centric Networking deployment demonstrates that the proposed solution ensures a reduction of the communication overhead up to 99.99% on the data plane, an overall bandwidth saving up to 99.93%, and a not negligible memory saving in intermediary routers. At the same time, the adoption of information-centric communication primitives for the control plane achieves an overhead reduction ranging from 29.36% to 51.13% with respect to an implementation based on the conventional OpenFlow protocol.