COPSS-lite: Lightweight ICN Based Pub/Sub for IoT Environments

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm that treats content as the first class entity. It provides content to users without regards to the current location or source of the content. The publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have gained popularity in Internet. Pub/sub systems dismisses the need for users to request every content of their interest. Instead, the content is supplied to the interested users (subscribers) as and when it is published. CCN/NDN are popular ICN proposals widely accepted in the ICN community however, they do not provide an efficient pub/sub mechanism. COPSS enhances CCN/NDN with an efficient pub/sub capability. Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing topic of interest in both Academia and Industry. The current designs for IoT relies on IP. However, the IoT devices are constrained in their available resources and IP is heavy for their operation.We observed that IoT’s are information centric in nature and hence ICN is a more suitable candidate to support IoT environments. Although NDN and COPSS work well for the Internet, their current full fledged implementations cannot be used by the resource constrained IoT devices. CCN-lite is a light weight, inter-operable version of the CCNx protocol for supporting the IoT devices. However, CCN-lite like its ancestors lacks the support for an efficient pub/sub mechanism. In this paper, we developed COPSS-lite, an efficient and light weight implementation of pub/sub for IoT. COPSS-lite is developed to enhance CCN-lite and also support multi-hop connection by incorporating the famous RPL protocol for low power and lossy networks. We provide a preliminary evaluation to show proof of operability with real world sensor devices in IoT lab. Our results show that COPSS-lite is compact, operates on all platforms that support CCN-lite and we observe significant performance benefits with COPSS-lite in IoT environments.