LASeR: Lightweight Authentication and Secured Routing for NDN IoT in Smart Cities

TL;DR

This paper introduces LASeR, a scalable lightweight authentication and routing framework for NDN-based IoT in smart cities, addressing security and routing challenges in large-scale deployments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical routing and authentication framework for NDN IoT that is scalable, efficient, and suitable for large-scale smart city applications.

Findings

Supports deployment densities up to 40,000 nodes/km2

Achieves onboarding convergence in around 250 seconds

Overhead per node is less than 20 KiB

Abstract

Recent literature suggests that the Internet of Things (IoT) scales much better in an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) model instead of the current host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) model. In particular, the Named Data Networking (NDN) project (one of the ICN architecture flavors) offers features exploitable by IoT applications, such as stateful forwarding, in- network caching, and built-in assurance of data provenance. Though NDN-based IoT frameworks have been proposed, none have adequately and holistically addressed concerns related to secure onboarding and routing. Additionally, emerging IoT applications such as smart cities require high scalability and thus pose new challenges to NDN routing. Therefore, in this work, we propose and evaluate a novel, scalable framework for lightweight authentication and hierarchical routing in the NDN IoT (ND- NoT). Our ns-3 based simulation analyses demonstrate that our framework is scalable and efficient. It supports deployment densities as high as 40,000 nodes/km2 with an average onboarding convergence time of around 250 seconds and overhead of less than 20 KiB per node. This demonstrates its efficacy for emerging large-scale IoT applications such as smart cities.