Mobilityfirst: a robust and trustworthy mobility-centric architecture for the future internet

Abstract1 —This paper presents an overview of the MobilityFirst network architecture, currently under development as part of the US National Science Foun-dation’s Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program. The proposed architecture is intended to directly ad-dress the challenges of wireless access and mobility at scale, while also providing new services needed for emerging mobile Internet application scenarios. After briefly outlining the original design goals of the pro-ject, we provide a discussion of the main architectural concepts behind the network design, identifying key features such as separation of names from addresses, public-key based globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) for named objects, global name resolution service (GNRS) for dynamic binding of names to addresses, storage-aware routing and late binding, content- and context-aware services, optional in-network compute layer, and so on. This is followed by a brief descrip-tion of the MobilityFirst protocol stack as a whole, along with an explanation of how the protocol works at end-user devices and inside network routers. Ex-amples of specific advanced services supported by the protocol stack, including multi-homing, mobility with disconnection, and content retrieval/caching are given for illustration. Further design details of two key pro-tocol components, the GNRS name resolution service and the GSTAR routing protocol, are also described along with sample results from evaluation. In conclu-sion, a brief description of an ongoing multi-site exper-imental proof-of-concept deployment of the Mobili-tyFirst protocol stack on the GENI testbed is provid-ed. Keywords- Future Internet architecture, mobile networks, name resolution, storage-aware routing, GENI prototyping. 1