A Cloud of Things framework for smart home services based on Information Centric Networking

Abstract

Today, the novel Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm, where Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are merged together, is foreseen as a promising enabler of many real-life application scenarios, like the smart home. However, several issues are still debated in the design of CoT systems, including how to effectively manage the heterogeneity of IoT devices and how to support robust and low-latency communications between the cloud and the physical world. In this paper, we present a novel CoT platform that solves such challenges in the smart home domain by leveraging two groundbreaking concepts: Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Fog Computing. The proposal, called ICN-iSapiens, is a three-layered architecture where an intermediate (Fog) layer, consisting of smart home servers (HSs), is introduced between the physical world and the remote cloud, to support real-time services and hide the heterogeneity of IoT devices. Communication at the physical layer consists of name-based ICN primitives, which facilitate the network configuration and enable simple and effective interactions between HSs and IoT devices. As proof of concept, an experimental testbed is presented and some application examples are described to showcase the advanced capabilities of ICN-iSapiens.