An extension of Information-Centric Networking for IoT applications

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is getting noticed as an emerging network technology. Due to its attractive features such as accessing content by its name, in-network caching, etc., it is expected to apply to Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications typically collect a large amount of data widely distributed in various locations. In conventional ICN, it is not easy to access such data because each name for desired data needs to be specified beforehand and the number of requests for data becomes so large. In this paper, we propose a network architecture for IoT applications by an extension of ICN, namely Keyword-Based Content Retrieval (KBCR). When KBCR node receives a request with some keywords, it spreads multiple requests towards the data related to the keywords. When the node receives the multiple responses, it merges them into one response. This process is carried out on multiple nodes in tandem manner over the network. Hence, the requester can receive the aggregated data in one response and the number of request/response messages is reduced. This paper describes the concept of KBCR, a typical IoT application example, the detail of KBCR behavior for the application example, and finally shows the advantage of the proposal by numerical analysis.