Power Saving Extension for the NDN-Based GIF Protocol for the Internet of Things.

Power consumption and network lifetime optimization is an essential performance objective for the IoT networks. Since the devices in this type of networks are mostly battery powered with a limited battery life, energy saving strategies becomes vital for such systems operation. Typically, the standard sleep mode of the 802.15.4 protocol is used in order to reduce the power usage of the sensors in an IoT network. However, enabling the sleep mode function in an IoT device that utilizes the Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm is challenging. In this paper, we propose a power saving extension for the Geographic Interest Forwarding (GIF) protocol. In the proposed E-GIF scheme, a cross-layer approach is used, which allows direct communication between protocols at nonadjacent layers. More precisely, the interactions between the MAC and the Routing layers are fully exploited in order to integrate the sleep mode into the forwarding decision of the sensor nodes that uses the NDN protocol stack. To validate the proposed scheme, we extend the ndnSIM simulator to support wireless multihop communication. Simulation experiments confirm the viability and the effectiveness of the proposal.