The Nepal Research and Education Network (NREN) hosted the 55th Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN55) from March 13-17, 2023 at the Kathmandu Marriott Hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal.

APAN55 invited a wide range of participants, including researchers, scientists, policymakers, network professionals, telehealth practitioners, and other experts from the Asia-Pacific region and beyond to participate in workshops, tutorials, presentations, and lightning talks concerning innovative network technologies and applications.

As such, intERLab also held a SEA-HAZEMON@TEIN-II Workshop on Information Centric Networking on Internet of Things (ICN-IoTs) at the APAN55. The workshop took place on 14th of March and consisted of three time slots, which were 90 minutes each.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm that is gaining attention as a promising solution for current Internet’s limitations in supporting content-oriented communication. Dr. Adisorn Lertsinsrubtavee introduces the concept of ICN and its key features, such as named-based forwarding, in-network caching, and mobility. He also discuss different ICN architectures, such as NDN, CCN, and DONA, and their similarities and differences. Lastly, he highlighted some real-world applications of ICN, such as Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed computing.

This was followed by the training from Kalana G.S. Jayarathna who dived into SEA–HAZEMON – a community based IoT platform which focuses on Forest Fire and Haze Monitoring. His session focused on introducing the SEA–HAZEMON platform explaining the platform architecture, services and the evolution of the sensor nodes which make use of the platform. Towards the end of the session a he provided a hands-on training to get the participants ready for the next session.

In the next session, Raunak Mukhia continues the workshop through an interactive hands-on session which aims to introduce NDN application development, with a specific focus on IoT applications. The session covers several key areas:

• An overview of the important elements of NDN architecture, such as Named Data Objects (NDO), Content Store (CS), Forwarding Information Base (FIB), and Pending Interest Table (PIT), Interests and Data.
• Hands-on instruction on using NDN’s Forwarding Daemon and ndnpingserver, allowing participants to observe NDN in action.
• Defining a naming convention for NDOs that is suitable for IoT devices.
• Designing producer and consumer applications that follow NDN’s naming and routing system.
• Hands-on experience for participants to work with the producer and the consumer applications.
• A comparison between NDN’s producer-consumer model and the traditional IP-based client-server model, highlighting the differences between the two.

Upon completion of the session, participants should have gained an understanding of NDN architecture, an ability to design IoT applications that work with NDN, and an awareness of the differences between NDN-based applications and IP-based client-server applications.

Finally, in the last session of the workshop, Dr. Preechai Mekbungwan introduced ActiveNDN, an in-network computation framework designed for IoT devices that enables Edge/Mist computing capabilities. This framework utilizes the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture to distribute and perform computation functions across multiple nodes within the network.

During the session, he provided hands-on experience with example applications that demonstrated the system’s ability to distribute and perform computation functions across multiple nodes, providing aggregated results of the computed IoT data within the network.