# Comparative Analysis of Producer Mobility Management Approaches in Named Data Networking
###### Abstract  
Seamless management of producer mobility in named data networks (NDNs) has become an inherent requirement to satisfy the ever-increasing number of mobile user devices and the streaming of widespread real-time multimedia content. In this paper, we first classify the various producer mobility management (MM) schemes into four different approaches. Then, we select a representative scheme from each approach and conduct a comparative analysis between them to suggest the most suitable producer MM approach for a broad class of latency sensitive applications, such as video and audio streaming and broadcasting over NDNs. To assess and compare the efficiency and effectiveness of the representative schemes, we implemented them in the NDN defacto NdnSIM simulator and used the same network scenarios and mobility settings. The results show the superiority of the producer MM scheme that follows the data plane-based approach, which yielded lower data loss rates, lower data delivery delays and lower signaling overheads. named data networking (ICN); media streaming; producer mobility management; 5G; NdnSIM +
Footnote †: journal: _Applied_  
problem. The NDN architecture is based on the exchange of two packet types--interest and data--managed by three different data structures present in NDN routers: the content store (CS), forwarding information base (FIB), and pending interest table (PIT) [7]. NDN communication is initiated by a consumer sending an interest packet to acquire data. The interest packet is routed using the interest name until the required data packet is found (at the producer or at a cached copy in the network). The data packet is returned to the consumer by following the reverse path taken by the interest packet, thus decoupling the location of the consumer and producer in the communication process. Due to the decoupling of locations between the data consumers and producers, the NDN architecture fundamentally realizes the essence of consumer mobility management. Location decoupling means that consumers and producers do not have references to each other, nor do they know about each other's location in the network. Therefore, consumer mobility does not require re-establishment of a connection or reassigning addresses, as in the IP architecture. Despite this, it is not implied that mobility management is entirely handled in the NDN architecture. On the contrary, mobility is seen as one of the most challenging aspects of NDN because of the separation between forwarding decisions and the content identifier. Hence, it is evident that producer mobility in NDN is a reachability problem and requires demanding solutions. Producer mobility is addressed in the original NDN design by prefix announcement, where the producer floods the network to announce its new location in order to update the FIBs in the network after handoff. This solution causes heavy overhead in terms of signaling and bandwidth consumption. Nevertheless, it results in a large handoff delay. Consequently, producer mobility issues require effective solutions, which have been tackled by the research community wherein different producer mobility management approaches have been proposed. Furthermore, applications that are sensitive to end-to-end packet delays are becoming a primary source of today's Internet traffic (including Internet telephony, video conferencing, and networked gaming) [2, 8]. Hence, reducing latency is defined as a basic premise of 5G's requirements. This stringent latency requirement brings even more challenges to proposed producer mobility management approaches in NDN. In general, based on how producer mobility management is performed, the producer MM schemes proposed in the literature may be classified into two broad categories: an anchor based category, which relies on a central entity to handle producer mobility, and an anchorless category, which does not require any central entity to handle producer mobility.