Networking Group Content: RESTful Multiparty Access to a Data-centric Web of Things

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel multiparty content distribution method for the Web of Things using CoAP proxies, enabling efficient, secure, and asynchronous group communication compatible with existing IoT protocols.

Contribution

It introduces a CoAP-based multiparty content distribution approach with request aggregation, response replication, and integrated security, bridging the gap between NDN and traditional CoAP deployments.

Findings

CoAP proxy-based distribution matches NDN performance in tests.

The approach supports asynchronous group communication.

It maintains compatibility with existing IoT protocols.

Abstract

Content replication to many destinations is a common use case in the Internet of Things (IoT). The deployment of IP multicast has proven inefficient, though, due to its lack of layer-2 support by common IoT radio technologies and its synchronous end-to-end transmission, which is highly susceptible to interference. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduced hop-wise multi-party dissemination of cacheable content, which has proven valuable in particular for low-power lossy networking regimes. Even NDN, however, the most prominent ICN protocol, suffers from a lack of deployment. In this paper, we explore how multiparty content distribution in an information-centric Web of Things (WoT) can be built on CoAP. We augment the CoAP proxy by request aggregation and response replication functions, which together with proxy caches enable asynchronous group communication. In a further step, we integrate content object security with OSCORE into the CoAP multicast proxy system, which enables ubiquitous caching of certified authentic content. In our evaluation, we compare NDN with different deployment models of CoAP, including our data-centric approach in realistic testbed experiments. Our findings indicate that multiparty content distribution based on CoAP proxies performs equally well as NDN, while remaining fully compatible with the established IoT protocol world of CoAP on the Internet.