Neighborhood-aware Mobile Hub: An Edge Gateway with Leader Election Mechanism for Internet of Mobile Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of thousands of heterogeneous addressable smart objects (i.e., devices embedded with sensors and actuators) with Internet connectivity. Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) is characterized by considering the mobility of smart objects. For managing smart objects, it is necessary to provide a middleware. Mobile Hub (M-Hub) is an IoT middleware that collects, processes and distributes data from a large number of smart objects on the edge of the network. M-Hub runs on mobile devices, enabling them to be gateways. It represents an autonomous entity, able to detect a set of objects available in the neighborhood and to monitor them independently of other M-Hubs. Hence, in some situations it may happen that a same object is eligible to be monitored by several M-Hubs. In this context, this paper proposes Neighborhood-aware M-Hub (NAM-Hub), a leader election mechanism integrated to the M-Hub to determine a suitable gateway for each smart object discovered opportunistically. It considers context data gathered from the mobile device to dynamically elect leaders (i.e., a leader and a sub-leader). The proposed solution contributes to take advantage from the resources provided for the mobile gateway and avoids their wastage. The proposed leader election mechanism was tested and evaluated considering its performance and the results were promising, with short detection time and recovery time in the system.