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

IoT Content Object Security with OSCORE and NDN: A First Experimental Comparison

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) challenges the end-to-end transport of the Internet by low power lossy links and gateways that perform protocol translations. Protocols such as CoAP or MQTT-SN are degraded by the overhead of DTLS sessions, which in common deployment protect content transfer only up to the gateway. To preserve content security end-to-end via gateways and proxies, the IETF recently developed Object Security for Constrained RESTful Environments (OSCORE), which extends CoAP with content object security features commonly known from Information Centric Networks (ICN). This paper presents a comparative analysis of protocol stacks that protect request-response transactions. We measure protocol performances of CoAP over DTLS, OSCORE, and the information-centric Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol on a large-scale IoT testbed in single- and multi-hop scenarios. Our findings indicate that (a) OSCORE improves on CoAP over DTLS in error-prone wireless regimes due to omitting the overhead of maintaining security sessions at endpoints, and (b) NDN attains superior robustness and reliability due to its intrinsic network caches and hop-wise retransmissions

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

Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner. In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201

Connecting the World of Embedded Mobiles: The RIOT Approach to Ubiquitous Networking for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and flexible network stacks. This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is based on significantly different design trade-offs, the networking subsystem of RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms

Information-centric Networking for the Constrained Internet of Things

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) promises an enhanced reliability for content retrievals in the Internet of Things (IoT), while reducing link stress and network-related energy expenditure. Wireless, low-power regimes, however, pose challenging environments to present-day ICN IoT deployments, which provides grounds for rethinking how information-centric principles integrate into the resource-constrained IoT. The principal aspiration of this thesis is to revisit the constrained ICN deployment by putting emphasis on wireless and harsh deployments with very low resource capacities to achieve a reliable and secure data delivery that scales with the number of network participants. Part I of this manuscript develops a protocol suite for the low-power IoT to reduce memory demands, improve the utilization of wireless links, and lower the power consumption for information-centric content retrievals. A new convergence layer follows the design elements of IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), and adapts ICN packets to the small-sized Maximum Transmission Units (MTUs) of low-power links by providing a header compression scheme, link fragmentation, and protocol framing similar to EtherTypes. A lightweight Quality of Service (QoS) scheme on the network layer complements this protocol suite. It enables a coordinated resource management to reduce network latency, and to prevent queue starvation for prioritized traffic flows. Since device mobility and intermittent connectivity are prevalent in these regimes, a new publish–subscribe system bolsters the information-centric IoT against network disruptions, and improves routing agility on connectivity loss. Part II examines the Internet perspective of native ICN IoT networks, and then describes the construction of a data-centric Web of Things (WoT) to lead insights and techniques emerging from ICN research into a promising, realistic deployment trail for the growing IoT. This deployment option is based on standard protocol elements of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and reflects the three information-centric principles (i) stateful forwarding, (ii) hop-wise caching, and (iii) content object security. Real protocol implementations and testbed assessments on actual IoT hardware show that the data-centric WoT adheres to performance expectations of pure ICN deployments, while retaining full compatibility with Internet services

Group Communication with OSCORE : RESTful Multiparty Access to a Data-Centric Web of Things

Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschun

A Data-centric Deployment Option for CoAP

The information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm offers replication of autonomously verifiable content throughout a network, in which content is bound to names instead of hosts. This has proven beneficial in particular for the constrained IoT. Several approaches, the most prominent of which being Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) and Named-Data Networking (NDN), propose access to named content directly on the network layer. Independently, the CoRe WG developed mechanisms that support autonomous content processing, on-path caching, and content object security using CoAP proxies and OSCORE. This document describes a data-centric deployment option using standard CoAP features to replicate information-centric properties and benefits to the host-centric IoT world

Reliable Firmware Updates for the Information-Centric Internet of Things

Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschun