Handfan: A flexible peer-to-peer service discovery system for internet of things applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as an extensive network of interconnected devices that enables any physical object to be part of the worldwide network. The opportunity of everything being interconnected to the internet leads to many other challenges, such as many devices, the exponentially generated data, and the limited resources capacity of such devices (in terms of storage capacity, processing, energy, and accessibility). Decentralized systems and more particularly Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems can meet the requirements of IoT applications. Peer-to-Peer DHT-Based approaches enable an effective search within a logarithmic cost. However, two issues need to be addressed to suit efficiently resource-constrained IoT systems. The first technical gap is that DHT-Based approaches do not handle network scalability and resources allocation, so they assume both nodes and keys must be in the same space, therefore, they are exclusively determined by the output of the hashing function. The second gap is that service discovery in such approaches is independent of the node’s resources capacity, which makes it ineffective and unsuitable for resource-constrained IoT systems. To cope with such limitations, our approach fundamentally addresses the previous technical gaps in existing DHT-based approaches by the following: Firstly, it deals with the first issue by adopting a novel mapping mechanism for both keys and identifiers based on geometric angles, the same mechanism is applied for nodes auto-configuration. Secondly, it introduces a customized routing mechanism that factors in nodes' processing capacity. We consider the number of hops, routing table size, configuration overhead, and load distribution as performance metrics. The proposed protocol's implementation and simulation with multiple experimentations confirm our approach's out-performance and effectiveness against competing IoT application approaches.