Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild

TL;DR

This paper presents real-world experiments with Named Data Networking (NDN) in a large IoT deployment, analyzing its benefits, challenges, and improvements over traditional IoT protocols.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale NDN experiments in IoT, identifies shortcomings of CCN for IoT, and proposes enhancements to improve efficiency and content availability.

Findings

Decreased control traffic and interest messages.

Enhanced data caching improves content availability.

NDN outperforms traditional IoT standards in experiments.

Abstract

This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constraints. Our optimizations increase content availability in case of IoT nodes with intermittent activity. This paper also provides the first experimental comparison of CCN with the common IoT standards 6LoWPAN/RPL/UDP.