A unified hybrid information-centric naming scheme for IoT applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is key enabling technology for future Internet, and aims at connecting heterogeneous devices and objects using wireless technologies. This connectivity results in creating a massive number of heterogeneous devices, and a large amount of content, thereby creating new challenges regarding content, service, and device naming. Current Internet applications and use cases are now shifting toward the content-centric paradigm, where the content is the key element in the infrastructure. In this article, we design a hybrid multilayer naming scheme with multi-component hierarchical and attribute-value components for a data-centric Internet of Things. The proposed scheme targets smart IoT applications and provides built-in scalability, efficient routing, and security features. We incorporate a variable-length encoding method, with a prefix-labeling scheme in order to describe hierarchical location names with various embedded semantic functionalities. Moreover, the scheme supports fast local IoT communication using Name-to-Code translation concept, as well as multi-source content retrieval through in-network function. To evaluate the performance and prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we carry extensive experiments, using ndnSIM network simulator. The analysis shows that our proposed hybrid naming is inherently better than the existing state-of-the-art solutions, and drastically reduces the memory consumption, lookup time, routing and forwarding overhead, and enhances the overall IoT communication.