Overlay Enhanced Mobility for the Internet of Things

One of the major challenges to realize the Internet of Things is to support IP mobility for the large amount of connected entities when they move between different locations and access methods. Current solutions for mobility are host centric, requiring support from the infrastructure, or breaks backwards compatibility, which will take a long time or high economic motivation to implement. Solutions for context information exchange are created for specific, small, or localized scenarios with centralized coordination that do not scale well. There is therefore a need for a solution which both scales well, and support IP mobility, without additional demands on current or future Internet infrastructure.We propose the use of a dual-overlay network structure for both information dissemination and as an alternative to current IP mobility technologies. It separates identities from location by introducing a second overlay network where the identity-to-location association is stored. We show analytically that the proposed solution provide logarithmic latency for localization and reduces the overall workload when the number of sensors per host increases beyond seven, with a workload reduction of 15 percentage points at fifteen sensors per host.