Anchor-Less Producer Mobility in ICN

Mobility has become a basic premise of almost any network communication, thereby requiring a native integration into next generation 5G networks. Despite the numerous efforts to propose and to standardize effective mobility management models for IP, the result is a very complex, poorly flexible set of mechanisms not suitable for the design of a radio-agnostic 5G mobile core. The natural support for mobility, security and storage offered by ICN (Information-Centric Networking) architecture, makes it a good candidate to define a radically new solution relieving limitations of traditional approaches. If consumer mobility is supported in ICN by design in virtue of its connectionless pull-based communication model, producer mobility still appears to be an open challenge. In this work we describe an initial proposal for an anchor-less approach to manage producer mobility via Interest Updates/Notifications in the data plane, even in presence of latency-sensitive applications. We detail the different operations triggered by producer movements and position our contribution in the context of existing alternatives, by discussing either user performance and network metrics.