Distributed access control framework for IPv6-based hierarchical internet of things

IPv6 is considered as the most promising approach to enable the interoperability of the future Internet of Things due to its ability to provide sufficient public addresses. At the same time, hierarchical machine-to-machine communications have been identified as the key driver to integrate various IoT applications. This article focuses on wrapping up these technologies to provide seamless and interoperable IoT communications. We first introduce the background and standard supports for IPv6-based hierarchical M2M communications. Then the challenges and existing solutions are investigated for the massive access of IPv6- based hierarchical M2M networks with heterogeneous IoT applications. To this end, a systematic distributed access control framework is proposed with the aim of improving the overall network performance, achieving fairness, and dealing with dynamic network conditions. In addition, the optimal control and potential algorithms for the proposed control framework are developed. The performance evaluation shows significant performance gains in terms of utility maximization, network fairness, and application differentiation.