A mobility-compliant publish–subscribe system for an information-centric Internet of Things

The Information centric networking paradigm has proven particularly useful for the constrained Internet of Things (IoT), in which nodes are challenged by end-to-end communication without network assistance. This work focuses on the interaction between possibly mobile sensors and actuators in such IoT regimes which deploy the Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture. Constrained nodes in interactive scenarios need to be highly responsive but can only manage limited control state. We argue that the request-driven NDN networking paradigm, which prevents pushing of unsolicited data, should be preserved to confine the attack surface, whereas unsolicited link-local signaling can accelerate responses without sacrificing security. In this paper, we contribute HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a robust publish–subscribe scheme for typical IoT scenarios that targets low-power and lossy wireless networks running hundreds of resource constrained devices at intermittent connectivity. Our approach limits in-memory forwarding state to a minimum and naturally supports producer mobility, a temporary partitioning of networks, data aggregation on intermediary hops, and near real-time reactivity. We thoroughly evaluate the protocol by experiments in a realistic, large testbed with varying numbers of constrained devices, each interconnected via IEEE 802.15.4 wireless LoWPANs. We compare HoPP with common ICN pub–sub and mobility schemes as well as with basic MIPv6 and anchor-based multicast mobility. Implementations are built on CCN-lite with RIOT and support experiments using various single- and multi-hop scenarios.