A Named Data Network Approach to Energy Efficiency in IoT

In the IoT, the trade-off between content availability and energy efficiency plays a crucial role. The standard approach to energy efficiency in the IoT combines low-power radios, network protocols letting devices sleep most of the time, and centralized caching of content, either at a designated proxy or in the cloud via an uplink, which maintains IoT content availability while devices sleep. However, this approach is not possible in a number of IoT scenarios, where a designated gateway/proxy is unavailable most of the time. In this paper, we propose an approach leveraging distributed caching for IoT content, based on an information-centric networking paradigm. We extend the NDN protocol with a variety of caching and replacement strategies, and we discuss alternative approaches for extending NDN to accommodate such IoT use cases. Based on extensive experiments on real IoT hardware in a network gathering hundreds of nodes, we demonstrate these caching strategies can bring 90% reduction in energy consumption while maintaining IoT content availability above 90%.