The Beauty of ICN in IoT
One of the papers recenty presented at ICN-2014 described an interesting IoT implementation and corresponding experiment with CCN-Lite on the RIOT platform.
Previously, ICN has been perceived as providing conceptual benefits such as
- simplified, natural APIs to developers;
- increased robustness through caching;
- facilitating data fusion through hop-by-hop replication;
- reduced network stack layering; and
- inherent auto-configuration.
The authors describe their implementation of CCN-Lite on RIOT and their approach to realize IoT communication in a 60 node testbed. The idea is to apply Reactive Optimistic Name-based Routing (RONR), i.e., an ICN name-based forwarding approach to send requests for named information in an IoT network using a hybrid flooding/unicast approach.
Some results of their comparison:
- 70% less ROM, 80% less RAM usage by the stack implementation (compared to a RPL/6lowpan implementation);
- 50% reduction of transmitted packets thanks to RONR and ICN caching.
Some pointers for further reading:
- Emmanuel Baccelli, Christian Mehlis, Oliver Hahm, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild; ACM ICN-2014; September 2014; [paper], [presentation]
- CCN-Lite
- RIOT -- the friendly OS for the IoT
- ACM SIGCOMM ICN-2014