Opening the loops — Towards semantic, information-centric networking in the Internet of Things

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in increasing deployments promises a pervasive proliferation of smart things, capable of sensing, actuating, and processing information. In typical designs, however, application of each thing is restricted to a dedicated use case in a single network of connected devices, resulting in a closed loop of information flow. We argue that, given the envisioned diversity, capabilities, and sheer number of smart things, this obstructs the possibility of creating diverse and exciting applications that benefit of the generated information in public, global usage scenarios. In this paper, we thus aim to initiate the discussion of creating a true Internet of Things, i.e., interconnected IoT networks, based on provision and requests of generated information in a public infrastructure. We highlight the challenges in designing this infrastructure for feasible integration in the current Internet and IoT designs, comprehensive provision and retrieval of information, and versatile derivation of higher information contexts from single information sources. Assessing advantages and shortcomings of existing approaches, we propose a suitable approach and discuss both a centralized and distributed implementation of the proposed infrastructure.