  In future IoT environments it is expected that the role of personal devices
of mobile users in the physical area where IoT devices are deployed will become
more and more important. In particular, due to the push towards
decentralisation of services towards the edge, it is likely that a significant
share of data generated by IoT devices will be needed by other (mobile) nodes
nearby, while global Internet access will be limited only to a small fraction
of data. In this context, opportunistic networking schemes can be adopted to
build efficient content-centric protocols, through which data generated by IoT
devices (or by mobile nodes themselves) can be accessed by the other nodes
nearby. In this paper, we propose MobCCN, which is an ICN-compliant protocol
for this heterogeneous environment. MobCCN is designed to implement the routing
and forwarding mechanisms of the main ICN realisations, such as CCN. The
original aspect of MobCCN is to implement an efficient opportunistic networking
routing scheme to populate the Forwarding Interest Base (FIB) tables of the
nodes, in order to guide the propagation of Interest packets towards nodes that
store the required data. Specifically, MobCCN defines the utility of each node
as a forwarder of Interest packets for a certain type of content, such that
Interest packets can be propagated along a positive utility gradient, until
reaching some node storing the data. We evaluate MobCCN against protocols
representing two possible endpoints of the spectrum, respectively in terms of
minimising the data delivery delay and the resource consumption. Performance
results show that MobCCN is very effective and efficient, as it guarantees very
high delivery rates and low delays, while keeping the total generated traffic
at a reasonable level and also saving local resources.
