Information-centric Networking for the Constrained Internet of Things

Abstract

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.