IC-Lite: Enabling Lightweight and Real-Time Data Dissemination Over Information-Centric IoT

Information-centric Internet of Things (IC-IoT) enhances content distribution through its inherent in-network caching and multicast capabilities. However, effective data naming and disseminating in dynamic IoT environments remain challenging. In particular, each IoT device requires a routable name to facilitate data production and retrieval. Assigning and maintaining routable names for large numbers of sensors is cumbersome, restricting data management flexibility and scalability. Moreover, while data pushing is essential for IoT applications, such as real-time data uploads, the receiver-driven nature of ICN hinders push-based communication. In this context, we propose IC-Lite, an optimized framework built on IC-IoT, designed to provide lightweight, information-centric communication with simplified name assignment and data provisioning. Our approach introduces a modified forwarding plane that transmits data using simplified names and pushes data with the three-packet handshake, thereby enabling timely and efficient dissemination of real-time data from devices to application proxies. Evaluation results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that IC-Lite significantly reduces the overhead associated with name-based routing and namespace management, achieving an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency. In addition, IC-Lite reduces data delivery delay by 60.8% in dynamic scenarios, making it an efficient solution for real-time IoT applications.