LiteCast: Flexible Scalable and Uniform Local Data-Sharing in Real-Time

Advancements in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based strategies have brought drastic improvement in data-sharing in IoT. Many-to-many/all-to-all data-sharing is one of the most critical and complex patterns of data-sharing. To systematically address the complexity, ST-based strategies adopt a very well-defined setting which although apparently solves the problem, produces solutions that are relatively rigid and tightly coupled with the system. These solutions also focus on achieving global-outreach of the data from the source nodes. In contrast, when a system spreads over a large geographic area and contains proportionately many nodes, instead of global-outreach, it is more essential to have a facility for fast, and efficient local interaction/data-sharing among the neighboring nodes uniformly throughout the system. Unfortunately, the existing ST-based strategies fail to satisfy such requirements efficiently due to a lack of flexibility. In this work, we show how to incorporate controlled flexibility in ST-based many-to-many data-sharing. We design and implement a protocol LiteCast to accomplish efficient local interaction/coverage in the system irrespective of its span. Through extensive studies in publicly available IoT-testbeds we show that LiteCast consumes upto 67.5% lesser time in accomplishing local-coverage compared to the existing best-known many-to-many data-sharing strategies,