An Energy Efficient and Software-Defined Information-Centric Networking Approach to Consumer Mobility

Smart mobility embraces many services that require the exchange of huge amount of data between mobile consumers (e.g., vehicles, drones, smartphones) and fixed producers (e.g., cloud servers). Information Centric Networking emerged more than one decade ago as a suitable approach to build the Future Internet, offering flexible communication primitives for data exchange and native support to mobility. Unfortunately, baseline schemes do not take care of stale forwarding information generated into the core network because of consumer mobility and, as a consequence, it leads to an important waste of bandwidth and a higher energy consumption. An SDN-aided Information-Centric Networking approach has been recently formulated by the same authors of this contribution as a valid solution for the aforementioned issue. This paper further extends these promising research results by evaluating the impact of the amount of energy consumed by intermediary routers. The conducted tests demonstrate the proposed solution effectiveness through computer simulations, by considering different network, mobility, and application scenarios.