A mobility-compliant publish–subscribe system for an information-centric Internet of Things☆
Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging, and billions of new networked devices are forecasted. Currently, a variety of networking technologies are under experimentation for deployment in the low-end IoT. Despite of a maturing IETF protocol suite, dozens of incompatible industry solutions are rolled out to meet device and network constraints, as well as application specific needs [1], [2].
Facing this huge world of mainly constrained devices, it seems worth rethinking its networking paradigm. A very loose coupling appears most appropriate between nodes that often run on battery with long sleep cycles and connect via lossy wireless links. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [3], [4] decouples content provisioning from data producers in space which makes it a promising candidate. Additional decoupling in time and synchronization is desirable and attainable by a publish–subscribe layer.
Information-centric publish–subscribe networks have been proposed and an early prominent candidate is PSIRP/PURSUIT [5]. Its central control architecture, however, seems more suitable for an SDN-type deployment in LANs. Publish–subscribe schemes based on NDN like Content-based pub/sub [6] and COPSS [7] violate the loose coupling principle in their use of name-based routing or forwarding. Facing the current state of the art, we explore the problem of information-centric publish–subscribe for IoT networking with a particular focus on mobile and intermittently connected sensors and actuators.
In this paper, we take up the challenge and seek for an information-centric IoT networking solution that qualifies for real-world sensor–actuator deployments with resource-constrained characteristics and low-bandwidth, lossy link properties. We base our work on NDN [8] not only because of its widespread availability and implementations on IoT operating systems, but in particular because of its clean request–response scheme that prevents unwanted traffic at the constrained end nodes. We present and evaluate HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a lean, adaptive publish–subscribe layer that strictly adheres to the NDN communication pattern. We extend our previous work [9] by deepening the discussion and considering mobility and support for network disruptions. Our experimental findings on large IoT testbeds indicate that our system complies indeed to the challenging requirements of the IoT use case with promising performance. In particular, reliability and resilience of HoPP largely outperforms previously advised push notifications.
The structure of this paper continues as follows. Section 2 presents safety-critical use cases that challenge current low-power IoT networks by high reliability demands in harsh or mobile environments. We contribute a reflective elaboration of the underlying problem space in Section 3 together with an extensive discussion of related work. In Section 4, we dive into the design details of our publish–subscribe scheme, including the key aspects of network partitioning and publisher mobility. Implementation and evaluations of our system are described in Section 5. Section 6 compares HoPP with common NDN pub–sub and mobility schemes as well as with basic MIPv6 and anchor-based multicast mobility. Finally, we conclude with an outlook in Section 7.
Section snippets
IoT use cases
In this section, we focus on two use cases for the deployment of mobile IoT devices in industrial facilities and for safety control in harsh environments.
The problem of information centric IoT networking and related work
Overview
We now describe HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), our pub–sub system for lightweight IoT deployment. For a confined IoT environment, we make the common assumption that nodes form a stub network that may be connected to the outside by one or several gateways. Some global prefix is given to a gateway, but (wireless) IoT nodes can reach a gateway without global prefix changes in one or several hops unless they are temporarily disconnected [66]. Internally, nodes may be grouped according to one or several
Implementation for CCN-lite on RIOT
We implemented the HoPP extensions on the CCN-lite version ported to RIOT and deploy NDN. It is noteworthy that this software stack supports both, the NDN core protocol as well as CCNx. On RIOT, CCN-lite implements the netdev interface and runs as a dedicated single-threaded network stack.
The architecture of HoPP is depicted in Fig. 3. It mainly adds a new control protocol block that handles exchange and processing of the two new packet types (PAM, NAM) on the control plane. This extends the
Protocol comparison
In this last part, we compare the memory requirements and incurred signaling overhead of HoPP with alternative publish–subscribe and mobility approaches.
Conclusions and outlook
Node mobility and intermittent connectivity in low-power regimes severely challenge the routing between sensors and actuators. Long handover delays can result in extended downtime of nodes, or even partition a network topology. In this work, we found that (a) publish–subscribe with named topic prefixes can overcome the complexity of routing named data of things, and (b) NDN with link-local alerting has striking advantages for reactivity, security, and robustness in constrained environments.
We
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Cenk Gündoğan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Visualization, Data curation, Writing – original draft. Peter Kietzmann: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation. Thomas C. Schmidt: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Matthias Wählisch: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration,
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Cenk Gündogăn received the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Currently, he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Internet Technologies Group, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and explored within the I3 project—Information Centric Networking (ICN) for the Industrial Internet—routing, QoS, and resilience in ICN-based and IoT tailored networks. Recently, Cenk Gündogăn put focus on a data-centric Web of
References (81)
- et al.
AFIRM: Adaptive forwarding based link recovery for mobility support in NDN/IoT networks
Future Gener. Comput. Syst.
(2018) - et al.
Exploiting content centric networking to develop topic-based, publish–subscribe MANET systems
Ad Hoc Netw.
(2015) - et al.
On the impact of QoS management in an information-centric Internet of Things
Comput. Commun.
(2020) - et al.
Backscatter from the data plane – threats to stability and security in information-centric network infrastructure
Comput. Netw.
(2013) - et al.
Designing a LoWPAN convergence layer for the information centric Internet of Things
Comput. Commun.
(2020) - et al.
Comparative examination on architecture and protocol of industrial wireless sensor network standards
IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor.
(2016) - et al.
NDN, CoAP, and MQTT: A comparative measurement study in the IoT
- et al.
A survey of information-centric networking
IEEE Commun. Mag.
(2012) - et al.
A survey of information-centric networking research
IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor.
(2014) - et al.
Publish/subscribe for Internet: PSIRP perspective
Future Internet Assem.
(2010)
Content-based publish/subscribe networking and information-centric networking
COPSS: An efficient content oriented Publish/Subscribe system
Networking named content
HoPP: Robust and resilient publish-subscribe for an information-centric Internet of Things
An architecture for energy management in wireless sensor networks
SIGBED Rev.
Terms Used in Routing for Low-Power and Lossy NetworksRFC 7102
The future of sensing is batteryless, intermittent, and awesome
DTN communication in a mine
Information-centric Networking for the Industrial IoT
A survey of mobility in information-centric networks
Commun. ACM
A survey of mobility support in named data networking
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Research ChallengesRFC 7927
KITE: Producer mobility support in named data networking
Handling producer and consumer mobility in IoT publish-subscribe named data networks
IEEE Internet Things J.
MAP-Me: Managing anchor-less producer mobility in content-centric networks
IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag.
MobilityFirst: a robust and trustworthy mobility-centric architecture for the future internet
SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev.
Global source mobility in the content-centric networking architecture
Seamless producer mobility as a service in information centric networks
Towards disruption tolerant ICN
Information-centric networking meets delay tolerant networking: Beyond edge caching
VANET via named data networking
Towards seamless producer mobility in information centric vehicular networks
Pro-diluvian: Understanding scoped-flooding for content discovery in information-centric networking
A Case for Stateful Forwarding PlaneTech. Rep. NDN-0002
On the role of routing in named data networking
Let’s collect names: How PANINI limits FIB tables in name based routing
A light-weight forwarding plane for content-centric networks
Protocol Independent Multicast - Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification (Revised)RFC 4601
Caching and mobility support in a publish–subscribe internet architecture
IEEE Commun. Mag.
Cited by (9)
CBILEM: A novel energy aware mobility handling protocol for SDN based NDN-MANETs
2023, Ad Hoc NetworksCitation Excerpt :If LPM is successful then a new PIT entry is created containing the content name and interface from where the Interest Packet arrived at the relay node. However, if LPM is unsuccessful at FIB then the Interest Packet is discarded because there is no available data for the required content [25–27]. For getting the Data Packet, when the Interest Packet reaches the provider, the Data Packet is created and forwarded back to the consumer.
Mobility Management with Dynamic Forwarding in Smart Grid Communication
2023, Research SquareThe Impact of Industrial Internet and the Digital Economy on the Management and Development of Manufacturing Information Systems Triggering Digitization as IoT and Artificial Intelligence
2023, Journal of Information Systems Engineering and ManagementProducer Mobility Support Based on Dynamic Forwarding Path Management in ICN
2023, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering
Cenk Gündogăn received the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Currently, he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Internet Technologies Group, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and explored within the I3 project—Information Centric Networking (ICN) for the Industrial Internet—routing, QoS, and resilience in ICN-based and IoT tailored networks. Recently, Cenk Gündogăn put focus on a data-centric Web of Things deployment option by applying ICN principles to the IETF envisioned IoT network stack. He is one of the core developers and maintainer of RIOT.
Peter Kietzmann received the M.Eng. degree in information technology from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Internet Technologies Research Group. His particular research interest includes low-power radios, and IoT protocols, many of which he analyzed and transformed into code of RIOT. In the German research project I3 (ICN for the Industrial Internet) he explores IoT-based technologies for information centric networks and security components.
Thomas C. Schmidt is professor of Computer Networks and Internet Technologies at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), where he heads the Internet Technologies research group (iNET). Prior to moving to Hamburg, he was director of a scientific computer centre in Berlin. He studied mathematics, physics and German literature at Freie Universitaet Berlin and University of Maryland, and received his Ph.D. from FU Berlin in 1993. Since then he has continuously conducted numerous national and international research projects. He was the principal investigator in a number of EU, nationally funded and industrial projects as well as visiting professor at the University of Reading, U.K. His continued interests lie in the development, measurement, and analysis of large-scale distributed systems like the Internet. He serves as co-editor and technical expert in many occasions and is actively involved in the work of IETF and IRTF. Together with his group he pioneered work on an information-centric Industrial IoT and the emerging data-centric Web of Things. Thomas is a co-founder of several large open source projects and coordinator of the community developing the RIOT operating system—the friendly OS for the Internet of Things.
Matthias Wählisch is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin where he heads the Internet Technologies Research Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science with highest honors from Freie Universität Berlin. His research and teaching focus on efficient, reliable, and secure Internet communication. This includes the design and evaluation of networking protocols and architectures, as well as Internet measurements and analysis. His efforts are driven by improving Internet communication based on sound research. Matthias is the PI of several national and international projects, supported by overall 4.7M EUR grant money. He published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers (e.g., at ACM HotNets, ACM IMC, The Web Conference). Since 2005, Matthias is active within IETF/IRTF, including eight RFCs and several Internet drafts. His research results have been distinguished multiple times. Amongst others, he received the Young Talents Award of Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam for outstanding achievements in advancing the Internet, as well as the Excellent Young Scientists Award (10,000 EUR) for his contributions to the Internet of Things and their prospective entrepreneurial practice. He co-founded some successful open source projects such as RIOT, where he is still responsible for the strategic development.
- ☆
This work was supported in part by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the projects I3 – Information Centric Networking for the Industrial Internet and PIVOT – Privacy-Integrated design and Validation in the constrained IoT.