A case for ICN usage in IoT environments

Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a promising Future Internet architecture that aims to cope with the increasing demand for highly scalable and efficient distribution of content. Moving away from the Internet communication model based in addressable hosts, ICN leverages in-network storage for caching, multi-party communication through replication, and interaction models that decouple senders and receivers. This novel networking approach has the potential to outperform IP in several dimensions, besides just content dissemination. Concretely, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), with its rich set of challenges and requirements placed over the current Internet, provide an interesting ground for showcasing the contribution and performance of ICN mechanisms. This work analyses how the in-network caching mechanisms associated to ICN, particularly those implemented in the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) architecture, contribute in IoT environments, particularly in terms of energy consumption and bandwidth usage. A simulation comparing IP and the CCN architecture (an instantiation of ICN) in IoT environments demonstrated that CCN leads to a considerable reduction of the energy consumed by the information producers and to a reduction of bandwidth requirements, as well as highlighted the flexibility for adapting current ICN caching mechanisms to target specific requirements of IoT.