Breaking Out of the Cloud: Local Trust Management and Rendezvous in Named Data Networking of Things

Many emerging IoT approaches depend on cloud services to facilitate interoperation of devices and services within them, even when all the communicating entities reside in the same local environment, as in many "smart home" applications. While such designs offer a straightforward way to implement IoT applications using today's TCP/IP protocol stack, they also introduce dependencies on external connectivity and services that are unnecessary and often brittle. This paper uses the design of an IoT-enabled home entertainment application, dubbed Flow, to demonstrate how the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture enables cloud-independent IoT applications. NDN enables local trust management and rendezvous service, which play a foundational role in realizing other IoT services. By employing application-defined naming rather than host-based addressing at the network layer, and securing data directly, NDN enables straightforward and robust implementation of these two core functions for IoT networks without cloud connectivity. At the same time, NDN-based IoT designs can employ cloud services to complement local system capabilities. After describing the design and implementation of Flow, together with a discussion on preliminary generalization of the design, as an evaluation the paper conducts a brief thought exercise of how Flow could be realized using two popular IoT frameworks, Amazon's AWS IoT service and the Apple HomeKit framework, and compares that with the real implementation over NDN.