Networking Group Content: RESTful Multiparty Access to a Data-centric Web of Things

Content replication to many destinations is a common use case in the Internet of Things (IoT). The deployment of IP multicast has proven inefficient, though, due to its lack of layer-2 support by common IoT radio technologies and its synchronous end-to-end transmission, which is highly susceptible to interference. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduced hop-wise multi-party dissemination of cacheable content, which has proven valuable in particular for low-power lossy networking regimes. Even NDN, however, the most prominent ICN protocol, suffers from a lack of deployment. In this paper, we explore how multiparty content distribution in an information-centric Web of Things (WoT) can be built on CoAP. We augment the CoAP proxy by request aggregation and response replication functions, which together with proxy caches enable asynchronous group communication. In a further step, we integrate content object security with OSCORE into the CoAP multicast proxy system, which enables ubiquitous caching of certified authentic content. In our evaluation, we compare NDN with different deployment models of CoAP, including our data-centric approach in realistic testbed experiments. Our findings indicate that multiparty content distribution based on CoAP proxies performs equally well as NDN, while remaining fully compatible with the established IoT protocol world of CoAP on the Internet

Yodel: A Layer 3.5 Name-Based Multicast Network Architecture For The Future Internet

Multicasting refers to the ability of transmitting data to multiple recipients without data sources needing to provide more than one copy of the data to the network. The network takes responsibility to route and deliver a copy of each data to every intended recipient. Multicasting has the potential to improve the network efficiency and performance (e.g., throughput and latency) through transferring fewer bits in communicating the same data to multiple recipients compared with unicast transmissions, reduce the amount of networking resources needed for communication, lower the network energy footprint, and alleviate the occurrence of congestion in the network. Over the past few decades, providing multicast services has been a real challenge for ISPs, especially to support home users and multi-domain network applications, leading to the emergence of complex application-level solutions. These solutions like Content Delivery and Peer-to-Peer networks take advantage of complex caching, routing, transport, and topology management systems which put heavy strains on the underlying Internet infrastructures to offer multicasting services. In reality, the main motivation behind the design of these systems is rather sharing content than offering efficient multicast services. In this paper, we propound Yodel, a name-based multicast network architecture that can provide multi-domain multicast services for current and future Internet applications. Compared to the wider array of other name-based network architectures with clean-slate infrastructure requirements, Yodel is designed to provide multicast services over the current Internet infrastructure. Hence, Yodel puts forward several design goals that distinguish it from other name-based network architectures with inherent multicast capabilities. This paper is prepared to discuss the Yodel architecture, its design goals, and architectural functions.Comment: Contains animated figure

Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

The recent development in wireless networks and devices has led to novel services that will utilize wireless communication on a new level. Much effort and resources have been dedicated to establishing new communication networks that will support machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these systems, various smart and sensory devices are deployed and connected, enabling large amounts of data to be streamed. Smart services represent new trends in mobile services, i.e., a completely new spectrum of context-aware, personalized, and intelligent services and applications. A variety of existing services utilize information about the position of the user or mobile device. The position of mobile devices is often achieved using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips that are integrated into all modern mobile devices (smartphones). However, GNSS is not always a reliable source of position estimates due to multipath propagation and signal blockage. Moreover, integrating GNSS chips into all devices might have a negative impact on the battery life of future IoT applications. Therefore, alternative solutions to position estimation should be investigated and implemented in IoT applications. This Special Issue, “Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT” aims to report on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The twelve accepted papers in this issue cover various aspects of Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT