The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

Digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision making. Recent advances in computational pipelines, multiphysics solvers, artificial intelligence, big data cybernetics, data processing and management tools bring the promise of digital twins and their impact on society closer to reality. Digital twinning is now an important and emerging trend in many applications. Also referred to as a computational megamodel, device shadow, mirrored system, avatar or a synchronized virtual prototype, there can be no doubt that a digital twin plays a transformative role not only in how we design and operate cyber-physical intelligent systems, but also in how we advance the modularity of multi-disciplinary systems to tackle fundamental barriers not addressed by the current, evolutionary modeling practices. In this work, we review the recent status of methodologies and techniques related to the construction of digital twins mostly from a modeling perspective. Our aim is to provide a detailed coverage of the current challenges and enabling technologies along with recommendations and reflections for various stakeholders.

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Digital Twin: Values, Challenges and Enablers From a Modeling Perspective

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a significant resurgence in recent years. ICN promises benefits to users and service providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, security, and mobility). These benefits, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding significant complexity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justified and if we can achieve these benefits in an incrementally deployable fashion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative benefits attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and congestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we find that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary---most of the performance benefits can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative benefits of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.

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Less pain, most of the gain: incrementally deployable ICN

There have been many recent papers on data-oriented or content-centric network architectures. Despite the voluminous literature, surprisingly little clarity is emerging as most papers focus on what differentiates them from other proposals. We begin this paper by identifying the existing commonalities and important differences in these designs, and then discuss some remaining research issues. After our review, we emerge skeptical (but open-minded) about the value of this approach to networking.

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Information-centric networking: seeing the forest for the trees

Ubiquitous in-network caching is one of the key aspects of information-centric networking (ICN) which has recently received widespread research interest. In one of the key relevant proposals known as Networking Named Content (NNC), the premise is that leveraging in-network caching to store content in every node it traverses along the delivery path can enhance content delivery. We question such indiscriminate universal caching strategy and investigate whether caching less can actually achieve more . Specifically, we investigate if caching only in a subset of node(s) along the content delivery path can achieve better performance in terms of cache and server hit rates. In this paper, we first study the behavior of NNC's ubiquitous caching and observe that even naive random caching at one intermediate node within the delivery path can achieve similar and, under certain conditions, even better caching gain. We propose a centrality-based caching algorithm by exploiting the concept of (ego network) betweenness centrality to improve the caching gain and eliminate the uncertainty in the performance of the simplistic random caching strategy. Our results suggest that our solution can consistently achieve better gain across both synthetic and real network topologies that have different structural properties.

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Cache less for more in information-centric networks

This paper explores divergent visions for the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and business models, and the ecosystem that exists around them. In particular, it examines the role and reach of open source software (OSS) in building and sustaining the IoT, from infrastructure to applications and other value-added device content. Specifically, it explores how OSS can support competing and complementary architectures and meet looming IoT challenges, including security and privacy on this new digital frontier.

Interoperability and Open-Source Solutions for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is evolving around a plethora of vertical platforms, each specifically suited to a given scenario and often adopting proprietary communications, device and resource control protocols. The emerging need for cross-domain IoT applications and services highlights the necessity of interoperability across IoT platforms for a unified and secure sharing of and access to sensing/actuating resources. This position paper describes the current state of the IoT landscape, the opportunities that appear towards its sustainable evolution as well as the challenges that need to be addressed. In this context, the vision and objectives of the H2020 symbIoTe project are also presented; symbIoTe aims at the interoperability of IoT platforms by offering a flexible interoperability framework that will allow i) vertical IoT platforms to cooperate, ii) collaborative IoT platforms to form IoT-platform federations for exchange of resources and iii) independent developers to create innovative and cross-domain applications.

Towards the cross-domain interoperability of IoT platforms

This paper presents the vision of the EU FP7 project COMET (COntent Mediator architecture for content-aware nETworks), which aims at defining a novel content-oriented Internet architecture for simplifying content access and supporting content distribution in the network in a content-aware fashion. The COMET architecture will deal with content as a primitive, facilitating unified access to any type of content regardless of location and way of distribution. It will provide global content naming as well as infrastructure for resolving content names to identifiers required for content access. Moreover, this content-centric approach will take advantage of network, and server awareness, as well as user and content characteristics, in order to improve efficiency of content delivery.

COMET: Content mediator architecture for content-aware networks.

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COMET: Content mediator architecture for content-aware networks

While the current highly fragmented Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is characterized by an increasing number of platforms, their interoperability and collaboration is quite challenging to achieve, even more so due to numerous standardization initiatives. However, interoperability remains essential for future IoT deployments to facilitate the emergence of novel cross-domain applications and business opportunities. In this paper we present the interoperability approach pursued by the H2020 project symbIoTe which aims at creating a flexible interoperability framework supporting both semantic and organizational interoperability. While semantic interoperability, as a prerequisite for platform cooperation, has been widely addressed in literature, symbIoTe goes a step further to propose novel aspects of organizational interoperability by introducing a concept of IoT platform federations and roaming IoT devices. We present the symbIoTe architecture, highlight its major technical contributions, and provide an overview of current system implementation with focus on Cloud-based services which create a new perspective on IoT interoperability.

Sergios Soursos

Papers

Interoperability and Open-Source Solutions for the Internet of Things

Towards the cross-domain interoperability of IoT platforms

COMET: Content mediator architecture for content-aware networks.

COMET: Content mediator architecture for content-aware networks

Towards an IoT framework for semantic and organizational interoperability