Tangle centric networking

Abstract

Today's Internet is heavily used for multimedia streaming from cloud backends, while the Internet of Things (IoT) challenges the traditional data flow, with high data volumes produced at the network edge. Information Centric Networking (ICN) advocates against a host-centric communication model using content identifiers decoupling content from a location, and therefore, promising for distributed edge computing environments. However, the resulting coupling of data to content identifiers in ICNs introduces new challenges regarding dissemination of large data volumes and services and synchronization across multiple consumers. We present Tangle Centric Networking (TCN) - a decentralized data structure for coordinated distribution of data and services for ICN deployments. TCN simplifies the management of data and service changes and updates them accordingly in network nodes using principles of Tangles. Using simulations, first implementations of TCN show improvements in data discovery as well as less synchronization overhead of large volumes of data compared to a state-of-the-art ICN system.