Consumer driven information freshness approach for content centric networking

In the last few years, the research community has witnessed the rapid development of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) approach aiming at evolving the Internet from today´s host based packet delivery towards directly retrieving information in a secure, reliable, scalable, and efficient way. The Internet of Things (IoT) concept envisions scenarios in which “smart objects” can be interconnected to enable a whole new class of applications and services, positively increasing the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Although ICN tested scenarios have been mainly limited to multimedia and data, quoted advantages of ICN make from this architectural design a valuable approach in addressing the challenges that arise from the increasing deployment of IoT. In general, IoT applications impose stringent requirements in terms of information freshness, which can be highly impacted by the intrinsic caching mechanisms existing in ICN approaches. In the present work, the available freshness mechanism conceived as part of the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) protocol is assessed and a novel consumer driven information freshness approach is proposed to satisfy the consumers´ needs while mitigating the negative effect of the freshness requirements in the overall network performance. The new mechanism was evaluated through simulation, with obtained results showing that the proposed approach leads to better performance, as compared with the available CCN freshness mechanism.