Tangle Centric Networking (TCN)

TL;DR

Tangle Centric Networking (TCN) is a decentralized data structure inspired by ICN principles, designed to improve data coordination and exchange in distributed IoT and edge computing environments, reducing synchronization overhead.

Contribution

The paper introduces TCN, a novel decentralized data structure using Tangles for efficient data and service coordination in distributed networks.

Findings

TCN enables reactive updates to data and services.

Simulation results show reduced overhead compared to baseline.

TCN supports cooperative data work without significant performance loss.

Abstract

Today's Internet is heavily used for multimedia streaming from cloud backends, while the Internet of Things (IoT) reverses the traditional data flow, with high data volumes produced at the network edge. Information Centric Networking (ICN) advocates against a host-centric communication model which is promising for distributed edge computing environments and the execution of IoT applications in a decentralized fashion. By using naming schemes, data is tightly coupled to names instead of hosts which simplifies discovery and access to data and services. However, the tight coupling challenges network performance due to additional synchronization overhead of large data volumes and services. We present Tangle Centric Networking (TCN) -- a decentralized data structure for coordinated distributed applications and data exchange following principles of ICN. TCN can react on data and service changes and update them accordingly in network nodes, provide distributed data structures and enable cooperative work on the same data without huge overhead by using Tangles for coordination. We implemented TCN in simulations and evaluated the concept against a base line scenario.