1© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

Where are the opportunities for ICN in Sensor Networks?

Ralph Droms, Distinguished EngineerCisco, <insert acronym string here>

2© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

Intuitively, data objects are a match for the requirements of applications using sensor networks, as opposed to communication endpoints and sessions

The characteristics of sensors and related network technologies may not match the requirements of IP very well

ICN architecture is feasible for sensor networks; where are the specific advantages in implementation, deployment, operation and application support?

If ICN is going to have an impact in the sensor network space, it has to do something better than current technologies.

Why is ICN for Sensor Networks interesting?

3© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

There are many standards required for an IPv6 wireless mesh stack.

Does ICN require fewer resources (CPU, memory, energy) for a stack/application implementation?

Are there opportunities to take advantage of specific characteristics of the MAC/PHY transport to optimize the ICN application/stack?

Opportunities in Wireless Mesh Networking

4© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

Routing IP in a mesh network requires mesh establishment, ongoing route management and other overhead.

Can ICN name-based routing and object forwarding reduce overhead by using on-demand or geoloc routing?

There is overhead is associated with address assignment and management.

Can ICN reduce overhead by using named objects rather than host addresses?

Routing and Addressing

5© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

The IP model requires session security, access controls and other security features in a constrained device.

Can ICN reduce or refactor operational overhead by using purely object security?

Object Security…

Application

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Before ICN replaces IP, there will have to be a gateway function somewhere between ICN sensor networks and IP networks

Can a “secure object” architecture bridge the gap?

Application Layer

Application

Repo

IP network ICN network

7© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

…or, more generally, a push model for data object delivery

Not directly related to “what can ICN do better”, but some way is needed to address applications that currently don’t fit the Interest/Object message paradigm

Is there an ICN solution for “push” model that is an improvement over the existing IP models?

Designing for Actuators

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Backup…

9© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. IRTF icnrg interim meeting, 1/13/2015

Constrained devices Limited computing resources Automated provisioning Sleeping devices

Constrained networks Limited bandwidth Dynamic network topology

Tend to generate time series of data, with various scheduling models Periodic Exception Polling

Sensor Network characteristics