COPSS-lite: A Lightweight ICN based Pub/Sub System for IoT Environments

Abstract

Content Centric Networking (CCN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) are popular ICN proposals that are widely accepted in the ICN community; however, they do not provide an efficient pub/sub mechanism. Hence, a content oriented pub/sub system named COPSS was developed to enhance the CCN/NDN protocols with efficient pub/sub capabilities. Internet houses powerful devices like routers and servers that can operate with the full-fledged implementation of such ICN protocols. However, Internet of Things (IoT) has become a growing topic of interest in recent years with billions of resource constrained devices expected to connect to the Internet in the near future. The current design to support IoT relies mainly on IP which has limited address space and hence cannot accommodate the increasing number of devices. Even though, IPv6 provides a large address space, IoT devices operate with constrained resources and hence, IPv6 protocol and its headers will induce additional overhead for their operation. Interestingly, we observed that IoTs are information centric in nature and therefore, ICN could be the more suitable candidate to support IoT environments. Although NDN and COPSS are designed for the Internet, their current full fledged implementations cannot be used by the resource constrained IoT devices. Therefore, CCN-lite was designed to provide a light weight, inter-operable version of the CCNx protocol to support the IoT devices. However, we show that communication in the IoT networks resemble pub/sub communication paradigm. However, CCN-lite like its ancestors (CCN/NDN) lacks the support for an efficient pub/sub mechanism while COPSS cannot be directly applied to the constrained IoT networks. Therefore, in this work, we develop COPSS-lite, an efficient and light weight implementation of pub/sub along with multi-hop routing to support the IoT networks. Essentially, COPSS-lite enhances CCN-lite with pub/sub capability with minimal overhead and further enables multi-hop connections by incorporating the famous RPL protocol for low power and lossy networks. Through evaluation using the real world sensor devices from the IoT Lab, we demonstrate the benefits of COPSS-lite in comparison with stand alone CCN-lite. Our results show that COPSS-lite is compact, operates on all platforms that support CCN-lite and significantly improves the performance of constrained devices in the IoT environments.