NNCP: A Named Data Network Control Protocol for IoT Applications

Named Data Networking is a promising architecture that aims to realize Information-Centric Network design. The current NDN design & implementation only details interest and data packets which ensures ubiquitous data dissemination. Currently, there is no support of control messages similar to Internet control messaging protocol of IP networks. The use of content name instead of host addresses, combined with interest-data exchange model, and interest aggregations makes the design of such a protocol a challenging task. In this paper, we present a control protocol for named data networks, namely NNCP, that can relay different network error, information, notification, and service messages. The designed protocol may improve the network performance especially in the Internet of Things environment, and can easily be extended to support different information centric platforms.