ZBP-MM: Zone-based producer mobility management protocol in named data networking for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a diverse technology that primarily utilizes TCP/IP protocols in IoT environments. However, it is often argued that the existing IP protocol stack is insufficient to support data sharing and storage capabilities for mobile IoT applications. Named Data Networking (NDN) has gained significant attention over time as a solution to the limitations of host-centric services in traditional IP networks. The key advantages of NDN include name-based routing and network caching, along with mobility support in wireless networks. The integration of NDN and IoT can address issues related to frequent node mobility, name-based routing, and storage constraints on resource-limited devices. IoT devices are frequently in mobility, creating routing challenges when transitioning from one domain to another. Interest packets remain unsatisfied until the producer reconnects to a new Point of Attachment (PoA) and updates its location. Despite these reconnections, challenges such as interest and data packet losses, increased latency, and suboptimal routing paths persist during communication. Consequently, managing producer mobility remains difficult during the frequent movement of nodes across different IoT domains. This paper proposes a novel Zone-Based Producer Mobility Management (ZBP-MM) protocol for NDN-based IoT environments. The proposed technique is evaluated and compared against the OPMSS scheme using the ndnSIM simulator. Results demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieves better hop count and cache hit ratio, with minimized interest satisfaction delay and handover delay, compared to the OPMSS technique during producer mobility scenarios in intra- and inter-zones.