NDN multicast over wireless networks: A survey on fundamentals, challenges, and open issues

Wireless devices have shown remarkable growth in data demand in the last decade due to the proliferation of smart devices and the emergence of bandwidth-hungry applications. This increasing data traffic demand is overcrowding the radio frequency spectrum, leading wireless multicast schemes to become a popular research topic again, as they provide efficient data dissemination. NDN supports multicast communication by design. It is a networked system formed by named entities that adopt a communication model focusing on the content rather than its location. The architecture follows a receiver-driven communication model through which content consumers retrieve data through semantically meaningful names instead of specific destinations. Its properties are essential for multicast communication on ad hoc networks, as its features provide enhanced support for dynamic topologies, decentralized control, and the self-organization of participant nodes that communicate without needing a pre-existing network infrastructure. However, despite the wireless medium being broadcast by nature, NDN multicast is still challenging in wireless scenarios, especially in ad hoc environments, due to the node’s high mobility, link instability, constant handovers, and data transmission over a shared medium. Hence, this survey discusses the benefits of NDN for mobile scenarios through an in-depth analysis of NDN multicast features, focusing on fundamentals, challenges, and open issues when applied to wireless networking.