Evaluating Named Data Networking forwarding strategies in different IoT topologies

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing paradigm that has seen multitudes of devices getting connected. From smartphones to smartwatches, smart agriculture, and smart HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning) systems, schools, businesses, and homes to are trying to reduce human efforts and better lives through technology. The exponential growth of IoT devices on the Internet, results in a lot of challenges because the current Internet was not necessarily designed to cater for resource constrained devices. There is, therefore, a need to investigate an alternative Internet architecture that will take into account such device limitations and quantities. Named Data Networking (NDN) has been shown to be one of those architectures. Preliminary studies so far show that NDN has more advantages over the current TCP/IP architecture. NDN has forwarding strategies/ schemes that are essentially rules that tell NDN nodes how to forward interests and data packets from consumers to producers and back. This study aims to evaluate some of the forwarding strategies available in NDN, that is, best route, broadcast, multicast, and client-control strategy in different topologies that are star, mesh, ring, and a hybrid topology composed by mesh and star topology. The study was conducted by varying the number of producers in each topology, and the experimental results show that the multicast strategy outperforms the other strategies in a mesh, ring, and hybrid topology.