CCN-WSN - A lightweight, flexible Content-Centric Networking protocol for wireless sensor networks

In future Internet research, content centric networking (CCN) is a new promising approach. CCNx has been introduced recently as an open source protocol suite for CCN and implementation base for practical research. In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research, data or content centric approaches like in-network processing and data aggregation are important. While the principle of CCN is a suitable approach in WSNs, the CCNx protocol suite designed for PCs is not applicable to resource-constrained WSNs. Therefore, we design, implement and evaluate a lightweight variant of a CCN protocol specifically for WSNs called CCN-WSN as a lightweight alternative to implementing IP for sensor networks. Key concepts of CCNx protocol are integrated but a variety of aspects are revised to meet the memory and computational constraints of sensor nodes and communication patterns in WSNs. E.g. the message format is simplified and some fields are omitted completely. Instead, we propose a flexible naming strategy which extends the functionality of content names to add small amount of data in interest messages. For performance evaluation a challenging time-synchronization application was implemented with CCN-WSN to demonstrate the flexibility of the approach and a comparison with a reference protocol for data dissemination called AutoCast is presented.