A Realistic Deployment of Named Data Networking in The Internet Of Things

The Internet Protocol (IP) was designed decades ago as a networking solution for the Internet. Its mission was to allow computers to share expensive resources such as tape drives and printers. Nowadays, most applications do not use the Internet to share resources but to produce and consume content such as monitoring data, Web pages and movies.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant example of such applications. IoT systems involve multiple heterogeneous network technologies and protocols; ranging from Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to Wi-Fi. Furthermore, IoT involves multiple communication and storage equipment. A single data exchanged between a device (e.g., a sensor) and an application may traverse several entities such as proxies, gateways, forwarders, and cloud servers. The only concept that remains universal throughout all these components is the data itself. Therefore, the data-centric paradigm becomes the de facto approach for communicating in IoT and many modern applications.

The data-centric use of the Internet highlighted the limitations of IP. Therefore, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Groups spend significant efforts to adapt the host-centric model of IP to the data-centric needs of emerging applications, particularly the IoT. Some solutions that made the IoT feasible with IP are 6LoWPAN and CoAP. However, the shortcomings of IP remain difficult to hide.

Recently, new networking architectures with a native support of the data-centric model have emerged. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most promising architectures to provide a better support of IoT and future Internet. A global deployment of NDN as an alternative protocol for the Internet is not possible yet due to the limited support in network equipment and operating systems. However, many approaches do exist in order to use NDN in realistic IoT applications.

In this context, this work aims to give another look at IP-based solutions for the IoT such as 6LoWPAN. A realistic IoT architecture based on NDN is described and its main aspects are studied. An integration of NDN over low-power wireless technologies is designed, deployed and evaluated considering a Smart Farming application scenario. In practice, we design a stateless packet compression scheme and a lightweight forwarding strategy that is compliant with the NDN data-centric vision while managing constrained device resources.

This article was recently awarded “2020 Best Paper Award” for the Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility. Full article: https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JCSANDM/article/view/859