A Named Data Networking Stack for Contiki NG OS

Abstract

The current Internet has become the dominant use with continuing growth in the home, medical, health, smart cities, and industrial automation applications which are enabled by smart objects (constrained devices). These devices sense, gather and actuate information in their deployed environment. This concept is called as Internet of Things (IoT). In other words, IoT phenomenon is an emerging technology enabling such applications in our lives. IoT is regarded as a fourth industrial revolution because of it extensive coverage of services and applications. Intrinsically, Internet architecture and protocols has become a natural approach to apply to IoT design. However, despite the success of the Internet architecture and protocols, recent research has been reporting the deficiencies of this approach. IoT-based applications demand content oriented services. However, Internet design is host-centric. This architectural departure has led the researches into design of Future Internet Architectures (FIAs). Among them, Named data Networking (NDN) is also emerging as a promising FIA where it fits the communication needs of IoT networks typically. As a result, NDN architecture and protocols are considered to be implemented for IoT devices. Nevertheless, there are only a few implementation exists currently. Because of all of these reasons, we have aimed to provide design and implementation detail of a light-weight NDN protocol stack, called as $\mu \text{NDN}$, running on Contiki Operating System (OS) for constrained IoT devices. Contiki is an OS that is developed for constrained IoT devices. In this study, an NDN protocol stack that can work on top of IEEE 802.15.4 link and physical layers has been developed and presented. As far as we know, there is no any fully-functional open source NDN implementation in Contiki OS.