MF-IoT: A MobilityFirst-Based Internet of Things Architecture with Global Reach-Ability and Communication Diversity

Abstract

The rapid growth in IoT deployment has posed unprecedented challenges to the underlying network design. We envision tomorrow's global-scale IoT systems should support global device reach-ability, mobility, diverse communication patterns, and resource efficiency. Existing solutions either rely on IP protocols that do not have efficient mobility support, or seek application-layer optimizations that incur high computing and deployment overhead. To fill this void, we propose to adopt cleanslate network architecture in the core network that decouples locators from network addresses, and towards this end, we propose MF-IoT, which is centered around the MobilityFirst architecture that focuses on mobility handling. MF-IoT enables efficient communication between devices from different local domains, as well as communication between devices and the infrastructure network. The MF-IoT network layer smoothly handles mobility during communication without interrupting the applications. This is achieved through a transparent translation mechanism at the gateway node that bridges an IoT domain and the core network. In the core network, we leverage MobilityFirst functionalities in providing efficient mobility support for billions of mobile devices through long, persistent IDs, while in the local IoT domain, we use short, local IDs for energy efficiency. By seamlessly translating between the two types of IDs, the gateway organically stitches these two parts of the network. Through large scale simulation studies, we show that MFIoT is able to achieve the four features we envisioned for an IoT system, with performance optimizations in reducing network traffic load, avoiding congestion, and ensuring fast and timely packet delivery.