Leveraging Hybrid Information Centric Networking for Broker-Free Publish/Subscribe in IoT

In many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, clients are “content-centric” in the sense that they are interested in obtaining content or data regardless of their physical source. This pattern is different from “host-centric” communications wherein clients connect to a particular server to access its resources. The content-centric nature of IoT require a new kind of message delivery support whereby a client can query for data, and obtain the data from any node that has a copy of that data. Publish/subscribe, often called pub/sub for short, is a messaging paradigm that can facilitate this new communication pattern. In this paper, we propose Framework for Lightweight Publish-Subscribe (FLIPS), a lightweight topic-based pub/sub for IoT that uses the Hybrid Information-Centric Network (hICN) stack for distributed, broker-free operation. We implemented Flips using the open-source hICN transport library and tested its operation through network emulation. Compared with Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Flips can provide similar reli-ability and lower latency especially in scenarios where caching can opportunistically be used.