Hierarchical and Flat-Based Hybrid Naming Scheme in Content-Centric Networks of Things

Information-centric networking (ICN) approaches have been considered as an alternative approach to TCP/IP. Contrary to the traditional IP, the ICN treats content as a first-class citizen of the entire network, where names are given through different naming schemes to contents and are used during the retrieval. Among ICN approaches, content centric networking (CCN) is one of the key protocols being explored for Internet of Things (IoT), names the contents using hierarchical naming. Moreover, CCN follows pull-based strategy and exhibits the communication loop problem because of its broadcasting mode. However, IoT requires both pull and push modes of communication with scalable and secured content names in terms of integrity. In this paper, we propose a hybrid naming scheme that names contents using hierarchical and flat components to support both push and pull communication and to provide both scalability and security, respectively. We consider an IoT-based smart campus scenario and introduce two transmission modes: 1) unicast mode and 2) broadcast mode to address loop problem associated with CCN. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed scheme significantly improves the rate of interest transmissions, number of covered hops, name aggregation, and reliability along with addressing the loop problem.