Scalable object-to-object communication over a dynamic global network

Traditional networking architectures solve the problem of communication between hosts. However, the primary objective of networking is to support communication between objects that are associated with the hosts, such as data files, physical objects, or human beings. The O2O (Object-to-Object) architecture that we present in this paper builds on this simple idea and supports communication between all types of objects that can be registered with a host, including traditional software objects such as application instances and data files, as well as physical objects, sensors, or human beings. Such networked objects, as well as hosts, and subnetworks are often nomadic or mobile. In addition, there are several other types of events that make network topologies dynamic, including re-homing events, service level agreement changes, reconfiguration events, and node or link failures. We have designed the O2O architecture to handle such topology changes in a timely fashion using native routing and addressing mechanisms that scale to a global network with a very large number of networked objects. The architecture scales to Internet of Things and machine-to-machine network scenarios. We describe the O2O architecture, and report on the status of its evaluation within the EU FP7 project 4WARD, where it is being developed as an extension of the NetInf architecture.