Performance Implications for IoT over Information Centric Networks

Information centric networking (ICN) is a proposal for a future internetworking architecture that is more efficient and scalable. While several ICN architectures have been evaluated for networks carrying web and video traffic, the benefits and challenges it poses for Internet of Things (IoT) networks are relatively unexplored. In our work, we evaluate the performance implications for typical IoT network scenarios in the ICN paradigm. We study the behavior of in-network caching, introduce a way to make caching more efficient for periodic sensor data, and evaluate the impact of presence and location of lossy wireless links in IoT networks. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of our evaluations on IoT networks performed through emulations using a specific ICN architecture, namely, content centric networking (CCN). For example, we show that the newly proposed UTS-LRU cache replacement strategy for improved caching performance of time series content streams reduces the number of messages transmitted by up to 16%. Our findings indicate that the performance of IoT networks using ICN are influenced by the content model and the nature of its links, and motivates further studies to understand the performance implications in more varied IoT scenarios