On the Impact of QoS Management in an Information-centric Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises a relevant class of applications that require Quality of Service (QoS) assurances. Information Centric Networking (ICN) has shown promising characteristics in constrained wireless networks, but differentiated QoS has not yet fully emerged. In this paper, we design and analyze a QoS scheme that manages the NDN resources forwarding and queuing priorities, as well as the utilization of caches and of forwarding state space. In constrained wireless networks, these resources are scarce with a potentially high impact due to lossy radio transmission. We explore the two basic service qualities (i) prompt and (ii) reliable traffic forwarding. We treat QoS resources not only in isolation, but correlate their use on local nodes and between network members. Network-wide coordination is based on simple QoS code points that can be distributed via a routing protocol. Fairness measures that prevent resource starvation are part of this management scheme. Our findings indicate that our coordinated QoS management in ICN does not only effectively prioritize the privileged data chunks, but also improves regular data communication. We can show that appropriate QoS coordination can enhance the overall network performance by more than the sum of its parts and that it exceeds the impact QoS can have in the IP world.