An edge-facilitated message broker for scalable device discovery
Zhe Huang, Bharath Balasubramanian, Azzam Alsudais, Kaustubh Joshi · 2017
Searching for a particular device in an ocean of devices is a perfect illustration of the idiom 'searching a needle in a haystack'. Yet the future IoT and edge computing platforms are facing an even more challenging problem because their mission-critical operations (e.g., application orchestration, device and application telemetry, inventory management) depend on their capability of identifying nodes of interest from potentially millions of service providers across the globe according to highly dynamic attributes such as geo-location information, bandwidth availability, real-time workload and so on. For example, a vehicular-based crowd sensing application that collects air quality data near an exit of a highway needs to locate cars in close proximity to the exit among millions of cars running on the road. In a business model where an enterprise offers a framework for clients to avail such edge/IoT services, we investigate the following problem: "among millions of IoT/Edge nodes, how do we locate and communicate with only those nodes that satisfy certain attributes, especially when some of these attributes change rapidly?"