NDN-over-ZigBee: A ZigBee support for Named Data Networking

Abstract Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new architecture which allows communications using data’s natural names rather than hosts’ logical addresses. In recent years, several research projects have demonstrated the ability of NDN to support emerging IoT applications like home automation, smart cities and smart farming applications. This work aims to integrate NDN with ZigBee to give NDN a better support for IoT applications that are known to require wireless sensing/actuating abilities, mobility support and low power consumption. For this purpose, we present our NDN-over-ZigBee design and we show through experiments conducted with three different scenarios the suitability and the ease of use of NDN in IoT context. The choice of ZigBee is motivated by the fact that it is a network specification for low-power wireless personal area networks (WPANs) and supports a large number of nodes.