Adaptive Multi-Protocol Communication in Smart City Networks

Smart cities are progressively emerging and require city-wide networks able to maintain low delay and increased reliability. However, wireless communications in the urban environment are occasionally disrupted, leading to volatile network conditions and impeding traditional networks to cope with these demands. To this end, Named Data Networking (NDN) and Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) architectures, as well as the combined NDN-over-DTN (NoD) scheme have been introduced and are actively investigated for combating distinct communication challenges in wireless city-wide deployments. In this work we investigate the performance and reliability trade-offs of each approach in the smart city context, and accordingly propose an experimental system that employs interchangeably NDN, DTN and NoD driven by a novel Change Point (CP) based network reliability detector. The real-world experiments showed that the proposed multi-protocol adaptive system, called ALTER, leads to lower latency and increased reliability of the urban network, compared to non-adaptive NDN and NoD solutions.