Information-Centric Networking, A natural design for IoT applications?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is commonly perceived as the extension of the current Internet to our physical world. It interconnects an unprecedented number of sensors/actuators, referred as things, to the Internet. Facing the important challenges imposed by devices heterogeneity and the tremendous generated traffic, the current Internet protocol suite has reached its limits. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently received a lot of attention as a potential Internet architecture to be adopted in an IoT ecosystem. The ICN paradigm is shaping the foreseen future Internet architecture by focusing on the data itself rather than its hosting location. It is a shift from a host-centric! communication model to a content-centric one supporting among! others unique and location-independent content names, in-network caching and name-based routing. By leveraging the easy data access, and reducing both the retrieval delay and the load on the data producer, the ICN can be a viable framework to support the IoT, interconnecting billions of heterogeneous constrained objects. Among several ICN architectures, the Named Data Networking (NDN) is considered as a suitable ICN architecture for IoT systems. Nevertheless, new issues have emerged slowing down the ambitions besides using the ICN paradigm in IoT environments. In fact, we have identified three major challenges. Since IoT devices are usually resource-constrained with harsh limitations on energy, memory and processing power, the adopted in-network caching techniques should be optimized. Furthermore, IoT data are transient and frequently updated by the producer which imposes stringent requirements to maintain cached data freshness. Finally, in IoT scenario, devices are ! frequently mobile and IoT applications require keeping data continuity. In this thesis, we propose a caching strategy that considers devices constraints. Then, we introduce a novel cache freshness mechanism to monitor the validity of cached contents in an IoT environment. Furthermore, to improve caching efficiency, we also propose a cache replacement policy that targets to raise the system performances and maintain data freshness. Finally, we introduce a novel name-based routing for NDN/IoT networks to support the producer mobility. We simulate and compare our proposals to several relevant schemes under a real traffic IoT network. Our schemes exhibit good system performances in terms of hop reduction ratio, server hit reduction ratio, response latency and packet loss, yet it provides a low cache cost and significantly improves the content validity.