Post date: Sep 21, 2018 6:58:59 PM
Internet of Things (IoT) communication architectures and protocols are evolving to be able to cope with new challenges such as the processing of large amounts of data; filtering; data mining and classification; high heterogeneity in devices and software.
Today, IoT communication is supported by TCP/IP which were not designed having in mind time sensitive networks or low power networks. Energy is wasted each time data is transmitted, due to protocol overhead, and non-optimized communication patterns.
The most recent trend on communication protocols follow a publish/subscriber broker approach, which creates an abstraction between things that produce information, and people or devices that consume such information. Nevertheless, issues concerning mobility management, privacy, security, and resource consumption subsist mostly tied to the networking semantics of IP, which follow a host-based reachability approach.
The new architectural paradigm of ICN focuses on providing support to directly reach information objects, while in contrast today’s Internet is focused on reaching devices that store information objects. The design of ICN paradigms seem to bring in relevant features to IoT environments. ICN approaches such as NDN have integrated security support; reliable multi-path data-based routing; built-in mobility support such as an interface abstraction, which is relevant for multihoming. Being information-centric, ICN does not transmit data based on host identifiers, such as addresses.
The evolutionary trend and interoperability aspects of publish/subscriber approaches as well as of network architectures and protocols in general are being exploited by the COPELABS IoT Lab team.