ICN based Architecture for IoT
WINLAB, Rutgers University
WINLAB, Rutgers University
Huawei Technologies
Huawei Technologies
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 unified 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 today's Internet. Such an overlay solution, however, is inadequate to address the important challenges posed by a unified IoT system, 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 unified 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. In this proposal, we first present a few popular IoT scenarios in smart homes, smart grid, smart transportation, and smart healthcare. Then we identify a list of important requirements with the unified IoT architecture that promises to support tens of billions of objects. After discussing the weaknesses of the current overlay- based IoT solution, we propose an ICN-based solution, ICN-IoT, which can sufficiently satisfy these requirements. We present an example ICN-IoT architecture and discuss how it supports efficient data discovery, data processing and data distribution. Finally, we show that ICN-IoT efficiently supports context- based scenarios, which are very common for many IoT applications.