Lightweight Named Object: An ICN-Based Abstraction for IoT Device Programming and Management

The expected dramatic growth of connected things raises the issue of how to efficiently organize them, in order to monitor and manage functions and interactions. Information centric networking (ICN) is a communication paradigm that provides content-oriented functionality in the network and at the network level, including content routing, caching, multicast, mobility, data-centric security, and a flexible namespace. Thus, it is a viable solution for supporting Internet of Things (IoT) services without requiring any centralized entity. In this paper, we introduce the lightweight named object solution: a convenient way to represent physical IoT objects in a derived name space, exploiting ICN. We show that this abstraction can: 1) increase the programming simplicity; 2) offer extended functionality, such as augmentation and upgrading, to cope with the “software erosion,” and 3) implement a common interaction logic involving mutual function invocation. We present some proof-of-concept implementations of the proposed abstraction dealing with challenging IoT test cases; we also carry out a performance evaluation in a simulated network scenario.