The Internet of Things (IoT) has been enabling the deployment of new scenarios where the physical and digital worlds interact in unprecedented new ways. These interactions have manifested inadequacies of existing infrastructures and protocols, showcasing the need for evolutions, or more disruptive technologies. New architectures, such as Named Data Networking (NDN), offer new ways to interact with content at the networking layer, which have prompted the interest for IoT scenarios, but are not compatible with existing approaches. This letter presents a solution that provides interoperation and enhanced publish-subscribe content-centric mechanisms, allowing the NDN and Internet protocol worlds to coexist, in IoT scenarios.
KEYWORDSdiscovery, ICN, interoperability, IoT, NDN
INTRODUCTIONThe integration of information and communication technologies into common devices has been at the genesis of the Internet of Things (IoT). Affecting different capacities and societal sectors, disparate new requirements are placed over existing protocols. On one hand, this has simplified new radio solutions for IoT, such as ZigBee, LoRa, SigFox, and others, with electronics miniaturization providing small-factor interfaces. On the other hand, the Internet networking protocol has remained crystallized, with few innovations (ie, 6LoWPAN, which conveyed encapsulation, header compression, and resilience mechanisms) not actually providing any new benefit for IoT at a worldwide scale. In fact, IoT has substantially been relying more on protocols above the Transport layer, such as the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), 1 reflecting a more web-based services approach to device reachability and information consumption.Parallel to this, efforts have been made in exploring disruptive new approaches to network layer design, such as Information-Centric Networking (ICN), 2 exploited by instantiations, such as Named Data Networking (NDN). In NDN, the decoupling of a content's identification (or name) and its location, along with its ability for data caching at every network routing-able element and intrinsic security, has placed this new architecture under scope of new IoT possibilities for the Internet.3 Despite the potential and opportunities, several challenges were raised, 4 in an underdevelopment topic, with properties, such as node discovery and publish-subscribe abilities, becoming desirable, for example, in emergency notifications.Particularly, it becomes evident that introducing new mechanisms for a better IoT at the network layer will require an adaptation/coexistence period with legacy operations, further exacerbated by the fact that the plethora of existing scenarios will imprint different needs for both the operation and selection of mechanisms used for data interexchange. As such, an interoperability issue is raised. Setting up discovery functionalities for NDN, and establishing mechanisms for propagating this information across different network architectures are key elements in achieving interoperable IoT environments.Therefor...