  Recent literature suggests that the Internet of Things (IoT) scales much
better in an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) model instead of the current
host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) model. In particular, the Named Data
Networking (NDN) project (one of the ICN architecture flavors) offers features
exploitable by IoT applications, such as stateful forwarding, in- network
caching, and built-in assurance of data provenance. Though NDN-based IoT
frameworks have been proposed, none have adequately and holistically addressed
concerns related to secure onboarding and routing. Additionally, emerging IoT
applications such as smart cities require high scalability and thus pose new
challenges to NDN routing. Therefore, in this work, we propose and evaluate a
novel, scalable framework for lightweight authentication and hierarchical
routing in the NDN IoT (ND- NoT). Our ns-3 based simulation analyses
demonstrate that our framework is scalable and efficient. It supports
deployment densities as high as 40,000 nodes/km2 with an average onboarding
convergence time of around 250 seconds and overhead of less than 20 KiB per
node. This demonstrates its efficacy for emerging large-scale IoT applications
such as smart cities.
