Effective peer-to-peer design for supporting range query in Internet of Things applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the internetworking of diverse devices in an ad-hoc manner to support pervasive applications. IoT devices often generate a wealth of data that ought to be accessible and managed in a distributed manner. Such operational model requires architecture that supports contextual and information centric retrieval of data, and efficient data storage. In this paper, we argue that peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are well suited for IoT systems. However, existing P2P systems do not efficiently handle queries of data within a range, which is a popular access pattern in IoT applications. Moreover, many of the IoT devices are constrained in their computational resources and consequently the data management model has to cope with such limitation. Existing P2P solutions do not factor the heterogeneity of the involved nodes and assume abundant storage space. This paper opts to fill the technical gap and proposes an effective P2P solution for efficient handling of range queries in IoT (RQIOT). RQIOT employs a data distribution model based on both consistent and order-preserving hashing and introduces a novel scheme for capacity management of the involved devices. The simulation results have confirmed the effectiveness and scalability of RQIOT, and the superiority of its performance over competing approaches.