Reliable data delivery in IoT-ICN environments

n the IoT environment, which is characterized by a multitude of interconnected smart devices with sensing and computational capabilities, many applications are content-based, that is, they are interested in searching for contents rather than for specific locations, and contextualized, that is, the content is generated and consumed in the proximity of the user. In this context, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is an appealing model for efficiently retrieving application data, and the service decentralization towards the network edge helps to reduce the network burden being the data produced by IoT devices mainly confined in the area where they are generated. MobCCN is an ICN-based data delivery protocol that we conceived for operating efficiently in such context [1, 2], where static and mobile IoT devices are enriched with ICN functions. An efficient routing and forwarding protocol, exploiting opportunistic contacts among IoT mobile devices, is also devised to fill the Forwarding Interest Base (FIB) tables so as to forward correctly Interest packets towards the data producers. In this paper, we further enhance the reliability of MobCCN by exploring different retransmissions mechanisms, such as retransmissions based on number of received Interests for the same content, periodic retransmissions, single path, disjoint path, hysteresis mechanism and some combination of them. Simulation results show that the MobCCN version where periodic retransmissions are combined with the hysteresis mechanism, named MobCCN AH, brings to a marked improvement of network performance, with average delivery rates up to 95% and significant reductions of the path lengths, all this by issuing only a few retransmissions.