IoT Data Processing at the Edge with Named Data Networking

Processing high volumes of raw Internet of Things (IoT) data at the network edge is becoming a popular solution to guarantee lower latency interactions compared to the traditional computing in the remote cloud. The synergy between networking and computing domains is today enabled by innovative paradigms such as Named Data Networking (NDN) and its recent extensions, which support the request of computing services "by name" and their distributed execution right inside the network nodes, instead of being deployed in purpose-built servers. In this paper, we extend the NDN architecture to turn the network edge into a dynamic computing environment for running user applications relying on IoT data streams processing and analytics. Novel naming and forwarding mechanisms are defined to properly guide service requests towards edge computing nodes, as close as possible to the IoT data sources, in order to offer low latency and avoid that raw IoT data flood the network. Through simulations with ndnSIM, we analyse the performance of our proposal in terms of volume of data traffic and service delivery time.