Group Communication with OSCORE: RESTful Multiparty Access to a Data-Centric Web of Things

Content replication to many destinations is common in the IoT. IP multicast has proven inefficient due to a missing layer-2 support by IoT radios and its synchronous end-to-end transmission, which is susceptible to interference. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduced hop-wise multiparty dissemination of cacheable content, which proves valuable for lossy networks. Even Named-Data Networking (NDN), a prominent ICN, suffers from a lack of deployment.We explore a multiparty content distribution in an information-centric Web of Things built on CoAP. We augment CoAP proxies by request aggregation and response replication, which together with caches enable asynchronous group communication. Further, we integrate object security with OSCORE into the CoAP multicast proxy system for ubiquitous caching of certified content. We compare NDN, CoAP, and our data-centric approach in testbed experiments. Our findings indicate that multiparty content distribution with CoAP proxies performs equally well as NDN, while remaining compatible with the protocol world of CoAP.