Information Centric Networking in IoT scenarios: The case of a smart home

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm for the future Internet is fundamentally different from the classic host-centric Internet Protocol (IP). By leveraging unique, persistent and location-independent content names, ICN provides native multicast support, content-based security, in-network caching, and easy data access, which can be especially useful in the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, the attention is on the design of an ICN framework tailored to the smart home domain, considered as a major representative of IoT scenarios. The proposed solution encompasses the definition of a flexible and expressive naming scheme that supports data/command exchanges and configuration/ management operations, and also fits the common service models in the smart home domain (i.e., push, pull, multi-party). Use cases are provided to shed light on the system behaviour and preliminarily assess its potential and performance.