Communications of the ACM

Review articles

A Survey of Mobility in Information-Centric Networks

By Gareth Tyson, Nishanth Sastry, Ruben Cuevas, Ivica Rimac, Andreas Mauthe
Communications of the ACM, December 2013, Vol. 56 No. 12, Pages 90-98
10.1145/2500501
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Host mobility has been a long-standing challenge in the current Internet architecture. Huge proportions of traffic are now attributed to mobile devices;² however, despite this prominence, mobility often remains a badly handled concept. Some have recently argued that the main reason for this lies in its choice of what to name.¹⁴ The Internet Protocol (IP) names hosts based on their topological network location. Through this, it intrinsically binds the what (the name) to the where (the address). Consequently, a mobile host moving its physical location is often required to change its name creating numerous problems.

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Key Insights

Observations such as this have led to a flurry of research looking at how the future Internet could be redesigned. A prominent example is that of information-centric networks (ICNs).^14,26,30 ICNs propose a key paradigm shift, which involves replacing the Internet's existing host-based naming scheme with an information-based one instead. This article therefore chooses to follow Shakespeare's advice and ask "What's in a name?" rather than IP's approach of "Where's in a name?"

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