Powering Smart Homes with Information-Centric Networking

The growing trend of video traffic and ubiquitous Internet of Things applications have created substantial challenges for the host-centric communication model of today's Internet. As the major consumers of video applications and IoT devices, smart homes have become one of the critical components in the Internet ecosystem. In this article, we introduce a novel concept of intelligent and programmable home routers to power smart homes in the information-centric networking (ICN) architecture, which advocates a new content- centric communication paradigm for efficient content distribution and improved cybersecurity. The main features of the envisioned home ICN routers include at-edge cooperative caching for efficient content distributions, content modeling for security monitoring, and a delegation model of security operations between intelligent home ICN routers with resource-constrained IoT devices. The envisioned home ICN routers with much desired characteristics are a promising direction for addressing the rising challenges in operating, managing, and securing millions of smart home networks in the ICN architecture.