Exploiting ICN for Realizing Service-Oriented Communication in IoT

Abstract

The rapid growth in Internet of Things (IoT) deployment has posed unprecedented challenges to the underlying network design. We envision that tomorrow's global-scale IoT systems will focus on service-oriented data sharing and processing rather than point-to-point data collection. Requirements such as global reachability, mobility, communication diversity, and security will also develop naturally along with the change in the communication patterns. However, existing (IP-based) networks focus only on locations and point-to-point channels. The mismatch between the dynamic requirements and the functionalities provided by the network renders IoT communication inefficient and inconvenient. Information-centric networking (ICN) shifts the focus from location to the (identity of) information. This paradigm can naturally be adapted to IoT communication since service can also be identified as a type of information. To demonstrate the potential of ICN in IoT communication, this article adopts and modifies a particular example of ICN called MobilityFirst, and shows that the target architecture can satisfy the requirements posed by IoT communication. Similar adaptations can also be used by other ICN architectures such as NDN and XIA.