An adaptive duty-cycle mechanism for energy efficient wireless sensor networks, based on information centric networking design

The information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging paradigm that grounds networking primitives on content names rather than node locators (as in the current Internet). ICN targets seamless mobility, native muticast/multipath support, and content oriented security to better reflect the needs of today users. ICN could greatly improve the efficiency of content delivery also in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN typically provides information centric services: in fact, whenever a mote is queried, the asking user is interested to the information acquired by the sensors on top of that mote rather than establishing a point-to-point remote communication. In this manuscript, without lack of generality, we will focus on a particular type of ICN architecture, known as content centric networking (CCN). In such a context, we place our attention on the energy efficiency of forwarding, which is achieved via costly broadcasting. Our objective is to save energy while achieving a high user satisfaction rate. In CCN, when a node requests a content, it sends an interest message and the node with the corresponding content replies with a Content Object message. To enable CCN features, each node maintains three tables: a Content Store to cache contents; a Forwarding Interest Base to store forwarded interests and a Pending Interest Table (PIT) to record unsatisfied interests. In this work, we start by introducing the features of CCN in WSNs and the advantages that it brings. For the forwarding optimization, we come up with an ‘Adaptive and fully Distributed Duty-Cycle for Content-Centric Wireless Sensor Network’ (ADDC-CCWSN) mechanism. ADDC-CCWSN aims to reduce the activity of nodes with a high percentage of unsatisfied interests in their PIT. We argue that the approach can be applied (with some modifications) to any ICN architecture that works as a network of caches in pull mode. We also propose an analytical model for CCN-WSNs to examine the energy consumption of content delivery. In addition, we implement the proposed mechanism on Contiki and, through extensive simulations with Cooja, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant gain of energy efficiency compared to a CCN approach with mostly-on sensor nodes while ensuring a high interest satisfaction rate and keeping nearly the same delay.