ICN based Architecture for IoT - Requirements and Challenges
draft-zhang-iot-icn-challenges-02

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect billions of objects to Internet. After deploying many stand-alone IoT systems in different domains, the current trend is to develop a common, "thin waist" of protocols forming a unified, defragmented IoT platform. Such a platform will make objects accessible to applications across organizations and domains. Towards this goal, quite a few proposals have been made to build a unified host centric IoT platform as an overlay on top of today's Internet. Such overlay solutions, however, are inadequate to address the important challenges posed by a heterogeneous, global scale deployment of IoT, especially in terms of mobility, scalability, and communication reliability, due to the inherent inefficiencies of the current Internet. To address this problem, we propose to build a common set of protocols and services, which form an IoT platform, based on the Information Centric Network (ICN) architecture, which we call ICN-IoT. ICN-IoT leverages the salient features of ICN, and thus provides seamless mobility support, scalability, and efficient content and service delivery. This draft describes representative IoT requirements and ICN challenges to realize a unified ICN-IoT framework. Towards this, we first identify a list of important requirements which a unified IoT architecture should have to support tens of billions of objects. Though we see most of the IoT requirements can be met by ICN, we discuss specific challenges ICN has to address to satisfy them. Then we discuss important and popular IoT scenarios including the "smart" home, campus, grid, transportation infrastructure, healthcare, Education, and Entertainment.

Authors

Yanyong Zhang
Dipankar Raychadhuri
Luigi Alfredo Grieco
Emmanuel Baccelli
Jeff Burke
Ravi Ravindran
Guoqiang Wang

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)