Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild

This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constraints. Our optimizations increase content availability in case of IoT nodes with intermittent activity. This paper also provides the first experimental comparison of CCN with the common IoT standards 6LoWPAN/RPL/UDP.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures and tables, ACM ICN-2014 conferenc

On Content-centric Wireless Delivery Networks

The flux of social media and the convenience of mobile connectivity has created a mobile data phenomenon that is expected to overwhelm the mobile cellular networks in the foreseeable future. Despite the advent of 4G/LTE, the growth rate of wireless data has far exceeded the capacity increase of the mobile networks. A fundamentally new design paradigm is required to tackle the ever-growing wireless data challenge. In this article, we investigate the problem of massive content delivery over wireless networks and present a systematic view on content-centric network design and its underlying challenges. Towards this end, we first review some of the recent advancements in Information Centric Networking (ICN) which provides the basis on how media contents can be labeled, distributed, and placed across the networks. We then formulate the content delivery task into a content rate maximization problem over a share wireless channel, which, contrasting the conventional wisdom that attempts to increase the bit-rate of a unicast system, maximizes the content delivery capability with a fixed amount of wireless resources. This conceptually simple change enables us to exploit the "content diversity" and the "network diversity" by leveraging the abundant computation sources (through application-layer encoding, pushing and caching, etc.) within the existing wireless networks. A network architecture that enables wireless network crowdsourcing for content delivery is then described, followed by an exemplary campus wireless network that encompasses the above concepts.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures,accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications,Sept.201

HoPP: Robust and Resilient Publish-Subscribe for an Information-Centric Internet of Things

This paper revisits NDN deployment in the IoT with a special focus on the interaction of sensors and actuators. Such scenarios require high responsiveness and limited control state at the constrained nodes. We argue that the NDN request-response pattern which prevents data push is vital for IoT networks. We contribute HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a robust publish-subscribe scheme for typical IoT scenarios that targets IoT networks consisting of hundreds of resource constrained devices at intermittent connectivity. Our approach limits the FIB tables to a minimum and naturally supports mobility, temporary network partitioning, data aggregation and near real-time reactivity. We experimentally evaluate the protocol in a real-world deployment using the IoT-Lab testbed with varying numbers of constrained devices, each wirelessly interconnected via IEEE 802.15.4 LowPANs. Implementations are built on CCN-lite with RIOT and support experiments using various single- and multi-hop scenarios

Performance Evaluation of Caching Policies in NDN - an ICN Architecture

Information Centric Networking (ICN) advocates the philosophy of accessing the content independent of its location. Owing to this location independence in ICN, the routers en-route can be enabled to cache the content to serve the future requests for the same content locally. Several ICN architectures have been proposed in the literature along with various caching algorithms for caching and cache replacement at the routers en-route. The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate various caching policies using Named Data Networking (NDN), an ICN architecture proposed in literature. We have presented the performance comparison of different caching policies naming First In First Out (FIFO), Least Recently Used (LRU), and Universal Caching (UC) in two network models; Watts-Strogatz (WS) model (suitable for dense short link networks such as sensor networks) and Sprint topology (better suited for large Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks) using ndnSIM, an ns3 based discrete event simulator for NDN architecture. Our results indicate that UC outperforms other caching policies such as LRU and FIFO and makes UC a better alternative for both sensor networks and ISP networks

Subversion Over OpenNetInf and CCNx

We describe experiences and insights from adapting the Subversion version control system to use the network service of two information-centric networking (ICN) prototypes: OpenNetInf and CCNx. The evaluation is done using a local collaboration scenario, common in our own project work where a group of people meet and share documents through a Subversion repository. The measurements show a performance benefit already with two clients in some of the studied scenarios, despite being done on un-optimised research prototypes. The conclusion is that ICN clearly is beneficial also for non mass-distribution applications. It was straightforward to adapt Subversion to fetch updated files from the repository using the ICN network service. The adaptation however neglected access control which will need a different approach in ICN than an authenticated SSL tunnel. Another insight from the experiments is that care needs to be taken when implementing the heavy ICN hash and signature calculations. In the prototypes, these are done serially, but we see an opportunity for parallelisation, making use of current multi-core processors