Timed protocol analysis of interconnected mobile IoT devices

Abstract

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), application developers can rely on a variety of protocols and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support data exchange between IoT devices. However, this may result in highly heterogeneous IoT interactions in terms of both functional and non-functional semantics. To map between heterogeneous functional semantics, middleware connectors can be utilized to interconnect IoT devices via bridging mechanisms. In this paper, we make use of the Data eXchange (DeX) connector model that enables interoperability among heterogeneous IoT devices. DeX interactions, including synchronous, asynchronous and streaming, rely on generic post and get primitives to represent IoT device behaviors with varying space/time coupling. Nevertheless, non-functional time semantics of IoT interactions such as data availability/validity, intermittent connectivity and application processing time, can severely affect response times and success rates of DeX interactions. We introduce timing parameters for time semantics to enhance the DeX API. The new DeX API enables the mapping of both functional and time semantics of DeX interactions. By precisely studying these timing parameters using timed automata models, we verify conditions for successful interactions with DeX connectors. Furthermore, we statistically analyze through simulations the effect of varying timing parameters to ensure higher probabilities of successful interactions. Simulation experiments are compared with experiments run on the DeX Mediators (DeXM) framework to evaluate the accuracy of the results. This work can provide application developers with precise design time information when setting these timing parameters in order to ensure accurate runtime behavior.