Design choices for the IoT in Information-Centric Networks

Abstract

This paper outlines the tradeoffs involved in utilizing Information-Centric Networking (ICN) for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. It describes contexts and applications where the IoT would benefit from ICN, and where a host-centric approach would be better. Requirements imposed by the heterogeneous nature of IoT networks are discussed in terms of connectivity, power availability, computational and storage capacity. Design choices are then proposed for an IoT architecture to handle these requirements, while providing efficiency and scalability. An objective is to not require any IoT specific changes of the ICN architecture per se, but we do indicate some potential modifications of ICN that would improve efficiency and scalability for IoT and other applications.