Page 125 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

DESIGN OF SCALABLE DIRECTORY SERVICE FOR FUTURE IOT
APPLICATIONS

Ved P. Kafle, Yusuke Fukushima, Pedro Martinez-Julia, and Hiroaki Harai

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo, Japan

ABSTRACT communication loop [4]. However, before billions of new
Unprecedentedly a massive number of devices are getting devices or things, besides the conventional computers,
connected in the coming era of the Internet of Things (IoT). smartphones, and tablets get connected properly, there are
For discovery, remote access and management of these IoT many technical challenges we need to resolve. One of such
devices, an IoT directory service is needed to store and challenges is that IoT applications require a scalable,
provide their various attributes such as location, generated performance-guaranteed directory service that stores and
data types, owner’s name, and security keys. In this paper, provides information about the IoT devices such as
we present the architectural design of the IoT directory name/ID, location, owner’s name, generated data types (e.g.
service that is capable to store a huge number of temperature, air pollution and illuminance levels measured
heterogeneous records and provide fast lookup (latency of by sensors), security keys, and credentials. IoT applications
few milliseconds) and dynamic update (latency of few will retrieve the information, also called records, stored in
seconds), while fully complying with owner- or user-centric the IoT directory service to discover the devices and
security and privacy policy. To meet the performance securely obtain data and services provided by them. The
requirements despite fluctuations in the workload and IoT directory service will also play an essential role in
networking environment, we leverage tools of network providing IoT device managers with information necessary
function and resource virtualization to dynamically allocate for discovery, management, and remote configuration of
and adjust the computational and network resources IoT devices.
assigned to the directory service.
In this paper, we present the architectural design of an IoT
Keywords—Internet of Things, IoT, directory service, directory service that stores a huge number of
M2M, standardization heterogeneous records (about one billion) and provides fast
lookup (latency of few milliseconds) and dynamic update
1. INTRODUCTION (latency of few seconds) of records, while fully complying
with the device owner- or user-centric privacy policy. To
The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to resolve meet the aforementioned performance requirements despite
several challenges of the modern society by collecting and fluctuation in the workload and network environment
processing detailed information about events and conditions, our proposal instantiates on-demand caches and
environments with the help of billions of newly connected replicas, and leverages the network function and resource
devices or things. It makes human life safer, healthier, and virtualization tools to dynamically adjust computational and
more productive and comfortable. At the same time, it network resources allocated to them.
provides substantial business opportunities to various
vertical industries and social sectors involved in the fields The current Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and
of automobile, energy and utilities, transport, logistics, related schemes are not adequate for storing records related
smart cities, healthcare, fitness, sports, public safety, and so with IoT devices. The DNS was not designed to store
on. Consequently, the International Telecommunication heterogeneous types of names and resolve them into
Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU- various records within bounded-time, not to mention its
T) has recently established the Study Group 20 for the limited support for updating such records dynamically and
exclusive study and standardization of IoT technologies and the slow propagation of the updated records. Previous
applications including smart cities and communities [1]. A related studies, such as [5-7], have proposed few schemes
paper presented in the ITU Kaleidoscope conference 2015 of dynamic name services. However, they also have some
provides a good review of ITU-T’s IoT related activities limitations. For example, Auspice [5] does not consider the
[2]. record privacy and access control. Multi-level Distributed
Hash Table (MDHT) [6] does not consider frequent updates
The IoT is considered as the major contributor to 50 billion of the records (as it assumes only 1% records change per
devices expected to get connected to the next generation day), and CoDoNS [7] limits its proposal to fast lookup and
(known as 5G) mobile networks in 2020 and beyond [3]. It resilience to attacks through proactive caching, but updates
would also change the communication paradigm from are not in its focus. They also do not consider the issues of
human-centric to machine-centric by introducing a massive privacy. Similarly, the directory services specified in
number of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication Recommendation ITU-T X.500 [8] are capable to store
devices that operate without involving humans in the heterogeneous types of names and resolve them into

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