Anchor Free Mobility

Efficient mobility management techniques are critical in providing seamless connectivity and session continuity for mobile devices. However, current mobility management solutions require a central entity in the network core, tracking IP address movement and anchoring traffic from source to destination through point-to-point tunnels. This suffers from scalability limitations, creating bottlenecks in the network due to sub-optimal routing. Meanwhile, existing, alternative solutions are not feasible due to the current limitations of IP semantics, which strongly tie addressing information to location. In contrast, this work introduces an anchor-less mobility solution that exploits a new path-based forwarding fabric together with emerging mechanisms from information-centric networking. These mechanisms decouple the IP address from the path-based data forwarding to eliminate the need for traffic anchoring. Evaluation results illustrate a significant reduction in the network traffic cost when using the proposed solution, compared to an existing solution. Furthermore, this work introduces a seamless handover solution using random linear codes. In the proposed solution, coded traffic is disseminated in either a broadcast or a multicast fashion from source to the destination(s), where destination(s) selection is based on mobility prediction, in a proactive manner during handover. The combination of anchor-less mobility and coding helps to overcome data loss and handover failures, while reducing overall delivery cost. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using a realistic vehicular mobility data set and cellular network infrastructure. The results show that the proposed scheme is able to eliminate data loss with minimum handover failure, while reducing handover delay and packet delivery costs compared to an existing solution.