Research Themes

Information Centric Networking (ICN)

Messages are delivered to computers (hosts) in the Internet. E.g., if you specify http://www.google.co.jp/ in your web browser, a web page request is transmitted to the computer with host name www.google.co.jp. What you want is the web page itself and you have no idea of sending a request to a host computer. If a web page is moved from one computer to another, we cannot reach to the intended web page due to the restriction in the current Internet.

Information Centric Network tries to solve this problem of the Internet. The address of a message is not a host name but a content name in Information Centric Network. Requested content can be acquired regardless of the location of the content in the network.


Sustainable and Self-glowing Digital-twin Ecosystem to Support “City as a Service” (D2EcoSys)

D2EcoSys is a research project to develop an information sharing ecosystem where citizens participate in collecting sensor information to form digital-twin of a city.

VirIoT, which is explained next, is used to construct this ecosystem. Blockchain and InterPlanetary File System are also utilized to federate multiple smart cities and to assure trustability of digital-twin data.

This project is pursued in collaboration with Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo University of Technology, GAIAX, and Fukuoka University.


Fed4IoT project aims to construct a virtual platform which alleviates the difficulty in developing IoT services over multiple IoT systems as well as federates the IoT systems operating in isolation from each other by virtualizing IoT devices. We also aim to proliferate IoT systems by lowering CAPEX through IoT device virtualization.

Nakazato Lab. aims to create easy-to-use federated IoT systems by exploiting Content Centric Networking technology to federate IoT systems.

Fed4IoT is a joint project of four organizations from Japan, including Waseda Univ., Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Panasonic, and IIJ Innovation Institute, and four organizations from Europe, including Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni, Easy Global Market, Odin Solutions S.L., NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH.