DataClouds: Enabling Community-Based Data-Centric Services Over the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as one of the major trends for the next evolution of the Internet, where billions of physical objects or things (including but not limited to humans) will be connected over the Internet, and a vast amount of information data will be shared among them. However, the current Internet was built on a host-centric communication model, which was primarily designed for meeting the demand of pair-wise peer-to-peer communications and cannot well accommodate various advanced data-centric services boosted by the IoT in which users care about content and are oblivious to locations where the content is stored. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for the future Internet based on information-centric networking (ICN), which is called DataClouds, to better accommodate data-centric services. Different from existing ICN-based architectures, we take the sharing nature of data-centric services under the IoT into consideration and introduce logically and physically formed communities as the basic building blocks to construct the network so that data could be more efficiently shared and disseminated among interested users. We also elaborate on several fundamental design challenges for the Internet under this new architecture and show that DataClouds could offer more efficient and flexible solutions than traditional ICN-based architectures.