Information-Centric networking in environmental monitoring: An overview on publish-subscribe implementations

Internet of Things (IoT) is widely recognized as a key enabling driver in environmental monitoring systems, thanks to its inherent capabilities to provide sensing and actuation functionalities on a distributed basis. At the same time, the majority of IoT applications are Information Centric by design: they target specific actions that are not related to any network node but can be provided by multiple resources within the system. In this perspective, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, formulated to answer to Future Internet requirements, can natively and seamlessly support IoT technologies as a service bus. Moving to IoT-enabled environmental monitoring systems, the publish-subscribe data exchange model is the pivotal functionality that ICN architectures have to support. In fact, an environmental monitoring system can be easily set up by letting one or more collecting stations to subscribe to the events or sensed values, generated (i.e., published) by IoT nodes scattered in the scenario of interest. Unfortunately, the support for publish-subscribe functionalities is not uniform across the main ICN architectures designed so far. To shed some light on this issue, the present contribution analyzes to what extent ICN architectures are able to support publish-subscribe and highlights the missing building blocks to purse this objective.