A Lightweight and Identity-Based Network Architecture for the Internet of Things

The rising of the Internet of Thing has imposed new challenges for the Future Internet to cover the specific requirements in terms of simplicity, low-power, and addressing flexibility. In this paper we present an architecture that allows network elements (things) to reach each other in terms of their identities instead of addresses or flat labels. Thus, the network entities are addressed in a natural way from the knowledge the entities have about each other. This way we achieve a flexible, scalable, and sustainable naming for the entities. Finally, the Identity-to-Identity communication (session) is instantiated in top of a lightweight identifier-based network, so the sessions are the junction between the underlying transport network and the identity-based network architecture.