Ubiquitous Communication for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a modern re-imagination of Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing. Weiser identified a number of changes required to realise this vision, one of which is network support for highly mobile devices. This could not be met by the Internet Protocol 28 years ago, and can not be met by it today. The Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) architecture, which has a semantic separation of node’s topological location and identify in addressing, has been shown to support highly mobile devices by providing seamless connectivity through a layer 3 soft handoff. Experimental analysis of ILNP has only been done on workstations and server machines, however. This work describes the design and implementation of an ILNP overlay network built on UDP/IPv6 and its associated protocol operation. An experimental analysis of the operation of the system is done in an IoT scenario with a Raspberry Pi testbed to show how ILNP provides seamless connectivity across network transitions. This demonstrates that the ILNP architecture can successfully provide network mobility support in an IoT context with resource-constrained devices, enabling Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing