Content-Centric Networking in the Internet of Things

According to an estimate several billion smart devices will be connected to the Internet by year 2020. This exponential increase in devices is a challenge to the current Internet architecture, where connectivity is based on host-to-host communication. Information-Centric Networking is a novel networking paradigm in which data is addressed by its name instead of location. Several ICN architecture proposals have emerged from research communities to address challenges introduced by the current Internet Protocol (IP) regarding e.g. scalability. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is one of the proposals. In this paper we present a way to use CCN in an Internet of Things (IoT) context. We quantify the benefits from hierarchical content naming, transparent in-network caching and other information-centric networking characteristics in a sensor environment. As a proof of concept we implemented a presentation bridge for a home automation system that provides services to the network through CCN.