On supporting Ambient Assisted Living applications through NDN/IoT

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications are related to the use of technology to improve wellbeing and independence of older adults. These applications commonly are supported by Internet of Things technologies and require communication between devices and people in a scenario characterized by mobility and heterogeneity of devices and data. Besides the communication between devices and people, AAL applications also have strict requirements related to security, usability, and management. Named Data networking (NDN) is a content-centric approach created to address the current and future network requirements. NDN architecture allows the adoption of new services intrinsic to the network and decouples the content from its location. This elementary change in network structure allows solving many problems and challenges faced by AAL applications. In our work, we intend to enumerate the main requirements of AAL applications, identify limitations of current networking architectures and protocols (e.g., SDN) and evaluate how future Internet architectures, such as NDN, can address open issues to boost the adoption of AAL applications.