Contextualized Information-Centric Home Networking
Home network (Homenet) is a good application scenario for ICN considering it is a point where diverse users, devices, applications, and services meet. Homenets are getting increasingly complex with the presence of application specific sensors, smart appliances, and smart networking devices such as residential gateway. Home automation today is being driven by several alliances such as DLNA, AllJoyn, ZigBee, and Z-Wave aimed at supporting homenet services such as multimedia sharing, lighting control, climate control, and energy management. These standards overlay application semantics over a host centric architectures which is inefficient, and the lack of inter- operability among these standards results in high cost, inflexibility, and inter-operability issues. Homenet is an information-centric environment where the objective is to enable consumers and producers to interact in a contextual manner independent of their underlying topology arrangement. Although the overall homenet objectives over an ICN framework versus any other are the same; ICN can distinguish itself by providing a rich service abstraction layer applicable in local scale as in BAN/PAN/LAN, and also enable intelligent interaction beyond the homenet boundary. In this draft we share the idea of a contextualized information- centric bus (CIBUS) which builds over ICN abstraction of naming, name resolution, and content dissemination for home network by providing support for service management, context processing and monitoring, policy management, and policy based routing and forwarding. CIBUS allows applications and services to discover each other, subscribe/ notify to event upon which service composition can be realized locally or in a centralize manner. Furthermore, service policies can be applied at high granularity which can be imposed in the routing and forwarding plane through ICN extensions. Some of these CIBUS features that were realized in [5] is presented here.