MobCCN: a CCN-compliant protocol for data collection with opportunistic contacts in IoT environments

In IoT environments, a significant fraction of services canbe expected to be relevant and contextualised to the phys-ical area where data is generated. This is due to the typi-cal strong bond between IoT devices and the physical en-vironment where they are located. Moreover, communi-cation patterns may be largely content-centric rather thandevice-centric, as interest would be in getting the data, ir-respective of where they are generated or stored. In thispaper we propose MobCCN, a content-centric network pro-tocol to support data delivery in presence of tiny IoT devices(such as sensors) and users\u27 personal mobile devices (such assmartphones). MobCCN joins together opportunistic net-working techniques (to support contextualised, proximity-based communications) and Information Centric Network-ing (ICN) to support content-centric communication pat-terns. MobCCN defines a new CCN-like routing and for-warding algorithm, which dynamically builds a gradient-based content-dissemination graph using estimates of thecontact rates between nodes, and between nodes and thedata that is produced and stored in the network. While pre-serving compatibility with the standard CCN mechanisms,the MobCCN algorithm makes CCN routing and forward-ing suitable for opportunistic networking environments. Wehave implemented MobCCN in CCN-lite, a de-facto stan-dard lightweight implementation of CCN, which is suitablefor resource-constrained devices. Simulation results conform the feasibility of the proposed approach both in terms ofscalability and efficiency