Resilient IoT Architectures Over Dynamic Sensor Networks With Adaptive Components
Sharief Oteafy, Hossam S. Hassanein · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2016
As competing industries delve into the Internet of Things (IoT), a growing challenge of interoperability and redundant deployments is magnified. Specifically, as we augment more “things” in the IoT fabric, how will these components interact across their heterogeneity, let alone collaborate. In this paper, we address the core issue of component interaction and operation under the IoT umbrella. We present our contribution in the framework of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as a founding block in the IoT. More importantly, we present a novel paradigm in the design of WSNs, to build a resilient architecture that decouples operational mandates from the nodes. We abstract IoT things as wirelessly interfaced components, which introduce functionality physically decoupled from their devices; boosting resilience, dynamicity, and resource utilization. This approach dissects the study of any IoT nodal capacity to its “connected” components, and empowers dynamic associativity between things to serve varying functional requirements and levels. It also enables reintroducing only the components required to suffice for network operation, or only those needed to meet a new requirement. More importantly, critical resources in the network will be shared within their neighborhoods. Thus network lifetime will relate to functional cliques of dynamic IoT nodes, rather than individual networks. We evaluate the cost effectiveness and resilience of our paradigm via simulations.