In-network caching is one of the main pillars of the Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, where every Internet router, in the path between data sources and consumers, can cache incoming content packets. Multiple strategies have been designed for caching Internet of Things (IoT) data streamed by resource-constrained devices in edge domains and wireless sensor networks, while the benefits of IoT data caching at Internet-scale, including both edge and core network segments, have not been fully disclosed. In this work, we propose and analyse a novel probabilistic Internet-scale caching design for IoT data, which jointly accounts for the content popularity and lifetime. In the considered scenario, IoT contents are requested by remote consumers and delivered by crossing multiple edge and core network segments of the NDN-based future Internet. The proposal is composed of two distinct reactive caching strategies, a coordinated and an autonomous one, to be implemented in the edge and core domain, respectively. Achieved results show that the proposal outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by providing, among others, the highest cache hit ratio and the shortest number of hops. Such performances testify a lower pressure on energy-constrained devices and on the network infrastructure, overall contributing to the sustainability of the IoT ecosystem.

Edge computing is a key paradigm to offload the core network and effectively process massive Internet of Things (IoT) raw data without sending them to the cloud. This paradigm normally relies on a set of purpose-built and pre-planned servers, which host storage and processing resources to provide IoT services close to the data sources, thus saving core network resources and offloading the remote cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we propose to turn the network edge into a dynamic, distributed computing environment that supports the provisioning of IoT services, by exploiting the recent evolution of named data networking (NDN), supporting both name-based data retrieval and computation. Specific name structure and novel NDN forwarding mechanisms are designed; a distributed strategy is also engineered to select the service executor among edge nodes, with the objectives to: 1) limit the raw IoT data traffic crossing the network and 2) allocate the service execution according to the nodes' available processing resources. Numerical analysis shows that the performance of the proposed framework approaches the one of the optimal solution of a formulated integer linear programming problem. System-level ndnSIM simulations confirm that the proposal also outperforms the considered state-of-the-art benchmark solutions in terms of service provisioning time.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a communication paradigm for the future Internet that matches the pattern of information-oriented applications and provides in-network caching. Thanks to such properties, ICN has been recently considered as a solution for the IoT. However, IoT shows challenging features: many devices are resource-constrained and applications usually originate transient information. As a consequence, ICN-IoT solutions requires new design choices. Among them, it is crucial understanding if constrained devices can successfully implement ICN caching and forwarding functionalities, and what are the delivery performance. To provide hints in such a context, in this paper we evaluate the performance of different caching/replacement policies and forwarding strategies in an ICN-IoT wireless network. A novel forwarding scheme is also defined to reduce the load on constrained devices. Simulation results show that the devised caching and forwarding operations are beneficial for delivery performance: they reduce the traffic volume and save the devices’ energy resources.

With more than 75 billions of objects connected by 2025, Internet of Things (IoT) is the catalyst for the digital revolution, contributing to the generation of big amounts of (transient) data, which calls into question the storage and processing performance of the conventional cloud. Moving storage resources at the edge can reduce the data retrieval latency and save core network resources, albeit the actual performance depends on the selected caching policy. Existing edge caching strategies mainly account for the content popularity as crucial decision metric and do not consider the transient feature of IoT data. In this article, we design a caching orchestration mechanism, deployed as a network application on top of a software-defined networking Controller in charge of the edge infrastructure, which accounts for the nodes’ storage capabilities, the network links’ available bandwidth, and the IoT data lifetime and popularity. The policy decides which IoT contents have to be cached and in which node of a distributed edge deployment with limited storage resources, with the ultimate aim of minimizing the data retrieval latency. We formulate the optimal content placement through an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Results show that the proposal outperforms the considered benchmark solutions in terms of latency and cache hit probability, under all the considered simulation settings.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising communication paradigm for the challenging vehicular ad hoc environment. In particular, the built-in pervasive caching capability was shown to be essential for effective data delivery in presence of short-lived and intermittent connectivity. Existing studies have however not considered the fact that multiple vehicular contents can be transient, i.e., they expire after a certain time period since they were generated, the so-called FreshnessPeriod in NDN. In this paper, we study the effects of caching transient contents in Vehicular NDN and present a simple yet effective freshness-driven caching decision strategy that vehicles can implement autonomously. Performance evaluation in ndnSIM shows that the FreshnessPeriod is a crucial parameter that deeply influences the cache hit ratio and, consequently, the data dissemination performance.

In order to improve the forwarding performance of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm in wireless ad hoc environments, different nodes’ properties, such as geographical position and topological centrality, have been proposed as metrics to identify the suitability of a node as a forwarder. However, while these metrics may be efficient in terms of node selection, they can breach the privacy of the node itself. The more efficient these metrics are, the more private information they may reveal. In this letter, we propose a privacy-preserving ICN forwarding scheme based on homomorphic encryption for wireless ad hoc networks.