Resilience and technological diversity in smart homes

Abstract

This article introduces our abstract modeling strategy to represent the general features and topology of the kinds of integrated and technologically diverse networks that feature in IoT systems. We begin with smart home networks. We generate instances of our model and analyze their graph-theoretic properties with an emphasis on the resilience of critical services and connections to the Global Internet. In addition to considering the network connectivity graph of nodes and links in the model, we explain our technology interdependence graph techniques. Technology interdependence graphs allow us to illuminate critical interactions in multi-technology systems such as smart homes. Using relatively simple examples we show how our approach permits the exploration of the resilience properties of various instances of smart systems involving complex technological interdependency. We describe a practical way of approaching the graphs of systems with a wide variety of integrated technologies and we discuss properties such as connectedness and other metrics. This approach can serve as the basis for tackling the challenge of designing resilient IoT-based smart-cities from the point of view of network topologies. We also study smart home resilience through path redundancy and heterogeneity of network technologies with graph centrality metrics.