Adeel Mohammad Malik

Design choices for the IoT in Information-Centric Networks

This paper outlines the tradeoffs involved in utilizing Information-Centric Networking (ICN) for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. It describes contexts and applications where the IoT would benefit from ICN, and where a host-centric approach would be better. Requirements imposed by the heterogeneous nature of IoT networks are discussed in terms of connectivity, power availability, computational and storage capacity. Design choices are then proposed for an IoT architecture to handle these requirements, while providing efficiency and scalability. An objective is to not require any IoT specific changes of the ICN architecture per se, but we do indicate some potential modifications of ICN that would improve efficiency and scalability for IoT and other applications.

Attribute-Based Encryption on a Resource Constrained Sensor in an Information-Centric Network

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is drastically different from traditional host-centric IP networking. As a consequence of the disparity between the two, the security models are also very different. The security model for IP is based on securing the end-to-end communication link between the communicating nodes whereas the ICN security model is based on securing data objects often termed as Object Security. Just like the traditional security model, Object security also poses a challenge of key management. This is especially concerning for ICN as data cached in its encrypted form should be usable by several different users. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) alleviates this problem by enabling data to be encrypted under a policy that suits several different types of users. Users with different sets of attributes can potentially decrypt the data hence eliminating the need to encrypt the data separately for each type of user. ABE is a more processing intensive task compared to traditional public key encryption methods hence posing a challenge for resource constrained environments with devices that have low memory and battery power. In this demo we show ABE encryption carried out on a resource constrained sensor platform. Encrypted data is transported over an ICN network and is decrypted only by clients that have the correct set of attributes.

Employing attribute-based encryption in systems with resource constrained devices in an information-centric networking context

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is considered to be one of the most promising ways to be enforce access control in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). As the Internet of Things (IoT) is being considered as one of the primary use cases for ICN it raises the question of the compatibility between IoT and ABE. An important part of the IoT is the resource constrained devices, for them there is a challenge to perform the computationally expensive operations required for ABE. In this paper we consider ABE in sensor networks and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a system solution where the ABE operations are performed on the sensors. To properly discuss these concerns we have implemented two ABE schemes, a Single-authority ABE (SA-CP-ABE) scheme and a Multi-authority ABE (MA-CP-ABE) scheme. Results regarding the execution time, RAM usage, data overhead and battery consumption of these implementations on a sensor are presented. We conclude that it is possible, already today, to perform ABE on sensors for smaller policies. The main limitation in deploying ABE in sensors is the RAM size of the sensors.

Scalable point-to-multipoint communication for cloud networking using information-centric networking

This paper describes a scalable mechanism to set up a point-to-multipoint tree which supports ICN-oriented services such as publish-subscribe and request aggregation. The mechanism is based on autoconfiguration and legacy unicast IP routing. The scalability issues with several current ICN approaches that apply routing based on data object names can thereby be avoided. An application-independent network service can be built on this point-to-multipoint mechanism to enable a variety of use cases, e.g. content distribution, live video streaming, and machine-to-machine communication. We believe that this network service can be an important component in a cloud infrastructure. For evaluation purposes we have made two implementations of the mechanism. One implementation, which focuses on ease of migration, uses CoAP with small modifications. The other implementation uses the new NetInf protocol combined with legacy HTTP. The evaluation results show a performance improvement compared to traditional HTTP caching, and that the aggregation hierarchy inherent in the point-to-multipoint mechanism allows for scaling to a large number of clients.

Experiences from a field test using ICN for live video streaming

Information Centric Networking (ICN) aims to evolve the Internet from a host-centric to a data-centric paradigm. In particular, it improves performance and resource efficiency in events with large crowds where many users in a local area want to generate and watch media content related to the event. In this paper, we present the design of a live video streaming system built on the NetInf ICN architecture and how the architecture was adapted to support live streaming of media content. To evaluate the feasibility and performance of the system, extensive field tests were carried out over several days during a major sports event. We show that our system streams videos successfully with low delay and communication overhead compared with existing Internet streaming services, by scalability tests using emulated clients we also show that it could support several thousands of simultaneous users.

NetInf Live Video Streaming for Events with Large Crowds

Information Centric Networking (ICN) aims to evolve the Internet from a host-centric to a data-centric paradigm. In particular, it improves performance and resource efficiency in events with large crowds where many users in a local area want to generate and watch media content related to the event. We present the design of a live video streaming system built on the NetInf ICN architecture and how the architecture was adapted to support live streaming of media content. To evaluate the feasibility and performance of the system, extensive field tests were carried out over several days during a major sports event. Our system streams videos successfully with low delay and communication overhead compared with existing Internet streaming services. It can scale to support several thousands of simultaneous users at a time and is well-suited for events with large crowds and flash crowd scenarios.