In-Network Caching for ICN-Based IoT (ICN-IoT): A Comprehensive Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already emerged as one of the most popular directions in today’s information and communication technology (ICT) domain. With its advancement over different application areas, such as smart home, smart healthcare, industry 4.0, etc., a huge amount of data has been generated by billions of IoT devices, which aggravates the shortcomings of the network layer (IP)-based networks, such as limited expressiveness of IP addressing, inefficient support for mobility, and in-network caching. Building IoT on top of information-centric networking (ICN) is believed to be a promising solution to tackle the above challenge, especially the in-network caching of ICN can significantly benefit IoT in terms of reducing data and saving IoT devices’ energy. However, caching IoT data is more challenging than caching traditional Internet content, e.g., video, because IoT data are usually valid within a certain period of time, and IoT devices are typically constrained with battery. Hence, in this survey, we first review the current implementation proposals of ICN-based IoT (ICN-IoT). Next, we present the conventional caching decision policies and replacement policies which could be adopted to mitigate the aforementioned challenges, e.g., reducing IoT traffic, saving energy, and reducing data retrieval latency. Further, since leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques have the potential to further improve the caching efficiency by dealing with uncertainties, e.g., predicting unknown information, adaptively interacting with the environment, we also demonstrate the recently proposed ML-based caching schemes for ICN-IoT. In addition, we outline the open research issues and point out the future opportunities of caching in ICN-IoT.