# Global IoT Mobility: A Path Based Forwarding Approach
###### Abstract  
With the huge proliferation of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as connected vehicles, drones, and healthcare wearables, IoT networks are promising mobile connectivity capacity far beyond the conventional computing platforms. The success of this service provisioning is highly dependent on the flexibility offered by such enabling technologies to support IoT mobility using different devices and protocol stacks. Many of the connected mobile IoT devices are autonomous, and resource constrained, which poses additional challenges for mobile IoT communication. Therefore, given the unique mobility requirements of IoT devices and applications, many challenges are still to be addressed. This paper presents a global mobility management solution for IoT networks that can handle both micro and macro mobility scenarios. The solution exploits a path-based forwarding fabric together with mechanisms from Information-Centric Networking. The solution is equally suitable for legacy session-based mobile devices and emerging information-based IoT devices such as mobile sensors. Simulation evaluations have shown minimum overhead in terms of packet delivery and signalling costs to support macro mobility handover across different IoT domains. IoT; 5G; sensors; Information Centric Networks; micro mobility; macro mobility +
Footnote †: journal: Sensor and Actuator Networks  
since it largely affects users' experience with respect of preventing frequent disconnections and ensuring session continuity [5]. Realizing this information centric and mobile usage of the Internet has raised various architectural challenges, many of which have not been handled efficiently by the Internet architecture [6]. The mismatch between information dominance and the host-to-host communication model of the Internet has led to application specific solutions for content delivery which are very costly and often inefficient. Popular examples include Domain Name System (DNS) redirect which relies on maintaining multiple IP addresses to a single Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) and mapping the FQDN to one of the IP addresses, depending on the location of the IP addresses. DNS redirect selects a nearest Point-of-Presence (PoP) to the local DNS point that is not necessarily closest to the client. This results in some scenarios having highly inefficient mappings, thereby degrading the end-to-end QoS while increasing load inside the network [7, 8]. Another example is IP multicast that offers point-to-multipoint delivery for group communication applications on the Internet. However, its support for content delivery suffers from a lack of scalable access control mechanisms, address allocation, and network management [9]. In terms of mobility, the IP host-to-host communication paradigm that ties the end hosts address to its location prevents a moving host from naturally maintaining a single identifier when attaching to different points in the network. Therefore, the moving host is exposed to intermittent and, possibly, opportunistic connectivity. Such an approach does not achieve continuous connectivity while on the move, which is becoming an increasingly important requirement. The problem has generally been addressed by using IP tunnelling through a central anchor point, which tracks the IP addresses of moving hosts and instructs the access gateways to provide the same IP address to the same host [10, 11, 12]. In effect, the aforementioned solutions help to partially overcome the limitations of the Internet architecture; however, they do not provide a holistic solution to the problem. For example, they suffer from scalability constraints, as they create bottlenecks in the network. This is due to sub-optimal routing via the anchor point, which is often termed as \"dog-leg\" routing [13]. In this paper, we present the result of a mobility management approach that utilizes path forwarding architectures.