dRAIN: A Distributed Reliable Architecture for IoT Networks

The rapid increase in the number and variety of smart devices connected to the Internet has increased the need to ensure resilience, reliability, and traceability when transferring data within the current Internet of Things (IoT) network. The adoption of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can provide data with the above-mentioned features, but the low scalability and high cost related to the adoption of classical DLTs, like the blockchains, results in ineffective integration with most of IoT systems. Conversely, other DLTs, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), possess benefits comparable to those of blockchains without presenting most of the limitations that prevent their application in the IoT domain. Therefore, we present dRAIN: a distributed Reliable Architecture for IoT Networks. The adoption of this architecture can grant the communication, management, supervision, and updating of distributed IoT devices, guaranteeing the resilience of the system and the reliability and traceability of exchanged data. In order to test the scalability potential and to assess the actual limitation of the proposed architecture, we developed both a physical and virtual (simulated) Proof of Concept. The results of our analysis show adequate execution times for the operations, guaranteeing high levels of security with acceptable performance, and prove the architecture suitable for most IoT applications that do not require to process external data in real time.