Requirements and Challenges for IoT over ICN

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect billions of objects to the Internet. After deploying many stand-alone IoT systems in different domains, the current trend is to develop a common, "thin waist" of protocols forming a horizontal unified, defragmented IoT platform. Such a platform will make objects accessible to applications across organizations and domains. Towards this goal, quite a few proposals have been made to build a unified host-centric IoT platform as an overlay on top of today's host-centric Internet. However, there is a fundamental mismatch between the host-centric nature of todays Internet and the information-centric nature of the IoT system. To address this mismatch, we propose to build a common set of protocols and services, which form an IoT platform, based on the Information Centric Network (ICN) architecture, which we call ICN-IoT. ICN-IoT leverages the salient features of ICN, and thus provides seamless mobility support, scalability, and efficient content and service delivery. This draft describes representative IoT requirements and ICN challenges to realize a unified ICN-IoT framework. Towards this, we first identify a list of important requirements which a unified IoT architecture should have to support tens of billions of objects, then we discuss how the current IP-IoT overlay fails to meet these requirements, followed by discussion on suitability of ICN for IoT. Though we see most of the IoT requirements can be met by ICN, we discuss specific challenges ICN has to address to satisfy them. Then we provide discussion of popular IoT scenarios including the "smart" home, campus, grid, transportation infrastructure, healthcare, Education, and Entertainment for completeness, as specific scenarios requires appropriate design choices and architectural considerations towards developing an ICN-IoT solution