Internet of Hybrid Opportunistic Things: A novel framework for interconnecting IoTs and DTNs

Abstract

Towards realizing the goal of connecting everything in every possible way to the Internet, researchers recently are focusing on connecting Internet of Things (IoTs) in challenged environments that suffer from disrupted connectivity. To this end, Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) is considered as a potential enabler for providing communication in such environments. We argue that the existing approaches that integrate DTN as a mere communication substrate embedded in IoT devices, can only enable them to survive from disrupted environments. However, with such integration, the typical publish/subscribe semantics of IoT communications may not be utilized effectively. To the best of our knowledge, a unified hybrid framework that benefits from the semantics of both DTN and IoT communications is not yet proposed and implemented. In this work, we propose a novel and practical architectural framework for communications between IoTs and DTNs, and develop a working prototype on the off-the-shelf devices.