IoT for AAL: An Architecture via Information-Centric Networking

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems have become a main part in future internet research. In IoT, heterogeneous devices are connected to sense the environment or to observe special tasks. Many research fields use the seamless IoT infrastructure to interact between the integrated devices and diverse services. Considering the healthcare research, the number of elderly people is rapidly growing and they need more support in their life. Therefore, a new technology called Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has been proposed to better increase the life quality of elderly people. In AAL, the devices are mostly connected wirelessly to each other and/or to a healthcare service centre. It is challenging to build such a system and its deployment should be seamless and flexible. Therefore, IoT provides all main characteristics necessary for AAL environment and applications, including heterogeneous devices. However, IoT devices are resource-constrained with energy and memory. Recently, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been established as a best communication paradigm for future internet, particularly in IoT. Based on hierarchically structured names, ICN matches the application pattern of IoT systems and provides an efficient and intelligent communication paradigm for both IoT and AAL (IoT-AAL) technologies. In this work, we design an IoT architecture for AAL via ICN approach which will effectively improve the performance of communication between the heterogeneous devices and services integrated in IoT-AAL.