Browsing by Author "Waltari, Otto Kustaa"

Advanced low-cost wireless technologies have enabled a huge variety of real life applications in the past years. Wireless sensor technologies have emerged in almost every application field imaginable. Smartphones equipped with Internet connectivity and home electronics with networking capability have made their way to everyday life. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that has risen to frame the idea of a large scale sensing ecosystem, in which all possible devices could contribute. The definition of a thing in this context is very vague. It can be anything from passive RFID tags on retail packaging to intelligent transducers observing the surrounding world. The amount of connected devices in such a worldwide sensing network would be enormous. This is ultimately challenging for the current Internet architecture which is several decades old and is based on host-to-host connectivity. The current Internet addresses content by location. It is based on point-to-point connections, which eventually means that every connected device has to be uniquely addressable through a hostname or an IP address. This paradigm was originally designed for sharing resources rather than data. Today the majority of Internet usage consists of sharing data, which is not what it was originally designed for. Various patchy improvements have come and gone, but a thorough architectural redesign is required sooner or later. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm that addresses content by name instead of location. Its goal is to replace the current where with what, since the location of most content on the Internet is irrelevant to the end user. Several ICN architecture proposals have emerged from the research community, out of which Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is the most significant one in the context of this thesis. We have come up with the idea of combining CCN with the concept of IoT. In this thesis we look at different ways on how to make use of the hierarchical CCN content naming, in-network caching and other information-centric networking characteristics in a sensor environment. As a proof of concept we implemented a presentation bridge for a home automation system that provides services to the network through CCN.