Efficient information lookup for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is an emerging paradigm that allows the association of information with objects. The information about an object is stored in databases, distributed around the globe, maintained by various stakeholders that participate in the object's supply chain. A Discovery Service (DS) is responsible for collecting all these database URIs and feeding them to clients that query about an object. DSs are usually centralized and are designed to effectively aggregate as many information sources as possible, rather than trying to respond optimally to unforeseen user queries. In this paper we propose a novel, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) inspired, architecture that eliminates the need for a separate DS, enabling at the same time multi-ownership and flexible management of information that is associated with an object. In our ICN approach, information about an object is organized in scopes. Each scope has its own access control rules allowing easy control of information dissemination. Moreover scopes can be hierarchically organized, creating complex access structures that can reflect business relationships. In our architecture companies provide information about an object to the appropriate scopes, but they never lose control of this information. To access information associated with an object,a user queries the scope that corresponds to the desired context, which will forward the query to a service that will respond with the appropriate data. The query will not reveal any extra information, not authorized to be retrieved.