# ndInIoT-FC: IoT Devices as First-Class Traffic in Name Data Networks
## 1 Introduction  
The Internet of Things (IoT), a recent communication paradigm in which objects of everyday life are able to, among others, communicate with one another, has become an integral part of the Internet [1; 2]. The IoT devices have special characteristics, such as heterogeneous capacities (power, memory, battery) and in general these devices are small, constraint-oriented wireless sensors, and of course, of low cost. The nature of IoT devices and the huge amount of data generated by them causes serious failures in conventional network protocols, such as the traditional host-centered TCP/IP network: the address space is exhausted, and additional mobility-related mechanisms have been required. Moreover, the connection-oriented TCP requires resources (computing, memory and, energy) usually not available in small devices. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been considered the most promising candidate to overcome the drawbacks of host-centric architectures when applied to IoT networks [3]. Conceptually, in ICN each piece of data has a unique, persistent and location-independent name that is directly used bythe applications for content search and retrieval. Therefore, ICN enables the deployment of in-network caching and content replication thus facilitating the efficient and timely delivery of information. However, the best qualities of ICN architectures can become restrictions in the IoT universe in Smart Cities. The basic and efficient mechanics of ICN of only responding with content to the interests posted on the network, can be a major obstacle. For example, when we spread a large set (thousands) of environmental sensors throughout the city, we would have sensors that periodically make their measurements available, resulting in an avalanche of requests and therefore a massive network overhead. In addition, the efficient caching mechanism would spread thousands of copies of interests/data whose validity is restrict. To address the requirements of IoT communication models under the scope of ICN concept we are presenting ndnIoT-FC, a Named Data Network-based (NDN) architecture that respects the ICN rules but offers special treatment for IoT traffic. Our architecture combines efficient hybrid naming with strategies to minimize the number of Interests, applies publish-subscribe mechanisms and uses caching strategies that virtually eliminate copies of IoT data from the intermediate nodes. The ndnIoT-FC makes available new NDN-based application-to-application protocol to implement a signature model operation and tools to manage its life cycle. The proposed strategies are efficient and lightweight and can be applied to devices with low capacity of computational resources and memory, being thus perfectly suited to operate on edge devices and take advantage of fog computing paradigm [4; 5]. Our architecture also maintains total independence between network nodes, where decisions are made by the node without information or interference of the other nodes. To demonstrate its efficiency, we discuss the results of a simulated distributed gathering information system that collects measurements from environmental sensors installed in Data Collection Units (DCUs) scattered throughout the city. The collection services installed in the DCUs periodically transmit information to an IoT server (also denoted as broker) using the NDN concept. In a nutshell, the contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:  
* a hybrid naming with strategies to minimize the number of travelling Interests in IoT applications;
* a distinguished NDN caching strategy for IoT friendly communications;
* new NDN-based application-to-application protocol for IoT applications;
* a heterogeneous and diverse evaluation setup considering both traditional and pub-sub communication models; and
* a clear improvement in terms of network overhead and Pending Interest Table (PIT) entry registries, while keeping the consumer satisfaction ratio.