Adaptive Strategy to Improve the Quality of Communication for IoT Edge Devices

Abstract

In an IoT system, the response time of edge devices is calculated during the design time. These edge devices continuously provide data streams to ensure the smooth execution of a real-time IoT system. However, edge devices are prone to errors, and very often suffer issues when trying to maintain a certain level of communication quality in the presence of external interference. Any loss of communication at the edge device level can lead to a failure of the entire system or to misleading information being provided. Due to there being a large number of heterogeneous devices within the IoT system, it is not a trivial matter to monitor all of these devices from a centralised location or to explore system logs to determine any loss of communication. Hence, in order to maintain the highest level of of communication quality in as close as possible to the best theoretical response time, there is a need for a lightweight intelligent layer on the edge devices which could adapt depending on changes in the context. In this work, we propose an adaptive algorithm, which can predict the quality of communication of WiFi and BLE with an accuracy of 94.14% and 92.25% respectively. The adaptive layer can recommend the next best alternative available wireless communication protocol in case the existing wireless protocol’s quality degrades. Edge devices within IoT systems can be equipped with our proposed adaptive layer, which can help them to adapt according to dynamic context whilst ensuring the highest level of communication quality, thus, improving the overall resilience of the entire IoT system.