For a good overview on available tools, please check Section 4 of the RFC 7945 "Information-Centric Networking: Evaluation and Security Considerations" -> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7945#section-4
For instance, Baccelli et al. (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01010879v1/document) used CCN-lite (http://www.ccn-lite.net) on top of the RIOT operating system to conduct experiments over an IoT testbed.
Well to help you very closely, here is an article which discuss your concern regarding platform selection. Hope this link will help you.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.03473.pdf
You can find relevant information on Page 28-29.
In short, COntiki OS with Cooja simulator gives you options if you are planning to deploy your work as well by providing real time environment . Otherwise, ndnSIM is the only one easy and reliable option in which todays research community is working.
A couple of IEEE references I could quickly find are:
1. Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Network Using Type-2 Fuzzy Logic. IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 17, NO. 14, JULY 15, 2017, Jul-17. Padmalaya Nayak, Member, IEEE, and Bhavani Vathasavai
2. Performance appraisal of Wireless Energy Harvesting in IoT. IEEE, 2017 3rd International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Technology (EICT), Dec-17. Shishir Mallick; Al-Zadid Sultan Bin Habib; Abu Shakil Ahmed; Sk. Shariful Alam