A Cross-Architectural Quantitative Evaluation of Mobility Approaches.

Future Internet Architectures must support the rapid growth of traffic generated by mobile endpoints in a manner that is scalable and ensures low latency. We present a quantitative evaluation of three distinct approaches towards handling endpoint mobility: name-based forwarding, indirection and a global name service (GNS). Using a range of parameterized mobility distributions and real ISP topologies, we describe representative instantiations of each approach and evaluate their performance using four key metrics: update cost and update propagation cost in the control plane; and forwarding traffic cost and time-to-connect (TTC) in the data plane. (1) We show that by leveraging the fact that realistic endpoint mobility distributions show a high probability of being at a small subset of visited locations, name-based forwarding strategies can provide up to 60% improvement in control costs over simple best-port forwarding. (2) We show that the TTC in these name-based forwarding strategies is comparable to the TTC in the GNS. (3) Finally we show that a GNS-based approach offers the most suitable balance of total (combined data and control) cost to TTC across all approaches, all endpoint mobility distributions, and all ISP topologies considered.