Information-centric networking for the industrial internet of things

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is raising a new set of challenges. Massive deployments of low-power devices connected by lossy wireless links spread missiona "sometimes safetya" critical functions across machinery. Appropriate networking solutions need to be in place to scale up to the huge numbers of participants and at the same time compensate for the error-prone regime. In this chapter, we present Information Centric Networking (ICN) as a promising approach for serving the dominant IIoT use case: the exchange of content chunks with sensors and actuators, which may be intermittently connected or mobile. We review the key aspects of ICN with an emphasis on solutions that are widely implemented and ready to use and summarize advanced ICN features with comparative experimental evaluations. We conclude with a research agenda.