## 1 Introduction  
The rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant attention in recent times as it transforms the modern world into a vast interconnected network of things (also referred to as objects). These objects have been equipped with the capability to generate data, exchange information, and interact with the environment. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deemed as a promising component of IoTs as their environmental monitoring capability accompanied by the data collection, storage, and processing capacity make them fully compliant with the expectations of IoT. These networks have been utilized in a variety of applications such as smart grids [1], smart agriculture monitoring [2], smart health [3], smart home [4], environmental monitoring [5], battlefield surveillance [6], and smart building monitoring [7]. WSNs cannot operate in isolation and have to be connected to the internet to enable the monitoring and controlling authorities to approach the underlying sensor nodes for data acquisition [8]. Communication between the nodes in conventional WSNs is carried out through an address-based communication model [9]. However, this architecture poses various challenges (discussed in Section 2). To address the intrinsic restraints of address-based architecture while taking into account the requirements of WSNs, a potential flavor of Information-centric networking architecture referred to as Named Data Networking (NDN) has garnered significant attention specifically in terms of IoT. Unlike the traditional address-based networks, NDN considers the content as a first-class citizen of the network [10]. The consumers only specify what they want rather than the exact location where they expect the query to be entertained [11]. Each data unit is self-identifying and self-authenticating and may acquire by the authorized consumer by providing a persistent, distinctive, and location-independent name. Moreover, NDN architecture provides native support to in-network caching, mobility, and multicasting [9]. NDN was originally developed for the communication between the devices at an internet scale where the devices are usually equipped with multiple radio interfaces. In contrast, the WSNs are usually supplied with a single radio transceiver and all the transmissions and receptions are carried out via that interface. Several efforts have been devoted to the literature to investigate how to effectively utilize the NDN in WSNs [12] and how NDN naturally fits the WSNs compared with the conventional address-based model. Most of the schemes advocate the use of NDN for WSNs in terms of routing and forwarding [13], naming [14], Data caching [15], and security [16] among others. However, these schemes lack in providing a mechanism for potential forwarder selection for efficient content delivery in single radio WSNs. In this paper, we exploit the single radio WSN nodes in layered-based WSNs and propose CIDF-WSN, an efficient collaborative Interest and Data packet forwarding mechanism. CIDF-WSN develops a neighbor information base (NFIB) table which adapts a list of potential virtual faces-next-hop node Ids, based on their associated cost and enable the consumer to select the optimal next-hop forwarder node in its Interest packet forwarding phase. In order to update the cost associated with each virtual face entry of NFIB, we propose robust downstream Interest processing and upstream Interest processing mechanisms. In downstream interest processing, the downstream node in the lower layer overhears the transmission of the upper layer forwarder and update its associated virtual face cost in the NFIB table. The updated NFIB allows the node to designate the optimal node in future Interest forwarding.