Leveraging Solution-Specific Gateways for cost-effective and fault-tolerant IoT networking

Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel communication paradigm where devices, identified by unique addresses and belonging to different networks, are connected to the Internet. Communication between these devices and the Internet is facilitated with the help of IoT gateways. To have maximum coverage of network with reduced overall deployment cost, optimal placement of gateways is necessary. Owing to the high cost involved with IoT gateways, devices known as Solution Specific Gateways can be utilized along with IoT gateways for cost-effective gateway placement. In this paper, we propose a Network Intersection based Candidate Gateway Location Selection algorithm called NewIoTGateway-Select which determines the minimum number of gateways to be placed in a given Smart City scenario. NewIoTGateway-Select algorithm computes the candidate locations for gateway placement and selects optimal locations from them, in polynomial time. Additionally, our algorithm takes care of gateway failures and link failures by using k-coverage-connectivity based fault tolerance scheme. Our simulation results show that NewIoTGateway-Select algorithm gives better performance than Grid based Candidate Location Selection (GCLS) and Default Gateway Assignment strategy.