ICN based Architecture for IoT
draft-zhang-icnrg-icniot-architecture-00

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect billions of objects to Internet. Nowadays, the IoT landscape is very fragmented from both technological and service perspectives. As a consequence, it is difficult to cross correlate data coming from heterogeneous contexts and build added value services on top of them. For this reason, the current trend is to develop a unified de-fragmented IoT platform so that objects can be made accessible to applications across organizations and domains. Towards this goal, quite a few proposals have been made to build a unified IoT platform as an overlay on top of today's Internet. Such overlay solutions, however, inherit the same limitations of the IP protocol, in terms of mobility, security, scalability and communication reliability. To address this problem, we propose a unified IoT platform based on the Information Centric Networking (ICN) architecture, which we call ICN-IoT [2]. ICN-IoT leverages the salient features of ICN, and thus provides seamless device-to-device (D2D) communication, mobility support, scalability, and efficient content and service delivery. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the real diffusion of ICN-IoT architecture it is fundamental to deal with security and privacy requirements, since the system may handle sensitive information (e.g., user habits, devices location). Note that ICN-IoT needs to manage the security requirements at the early stage of the design, representing all the involved entities and their relationships, in order to better understand their interactions and, consequently, apply the proper countermeasures to the possible security attacks (e.g., data violation, privacy violation, access attacks). This draft begins by motivating the need for an unified ICN-IoT platform to connect heterogenous IoT systems. We then propose an ICN-IoT system architecture and middleware components which includes device/network-service discovery, naming service, IoT service discovery, data discovery, user registration, and content delivery. For all of these components, a secure solution is defined too. We also provide discussions on inter-connecting heterogeneous ICN-IoT domains.

Authors

Yanyong Zhang
Dipankar Raychadhuri
Luigi Alfredo Grieco
Sicari Sabrina
Hang Liu
Satyajayant Misra
Ravi Ravindran

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