Resilient Overlays for IoT-Based Community Infrastructure Communications

This paper considers the reliable delivery of sensor data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices to distributed cloud service instances in the face of localized failures for event detection, community infrastructure management, and emergency response. We develop and explore the notion of GEOgraphically Correlated Resilient Overlay Networks (GeoCRON) to capture the localized nature of community IoT deployments and their impact/vulnerability in the context of small failures and massive disruptions such as that caused by a large seismic event. As a focus use case, we study the viability and utility of GeoCRON in two different community sensor networks. The first, a large participatory sensing-style network of small inexpensive seismic sensors, reports ground motion in homes and businesses to a cloud service for detecting and characterizing earthquakes. The second, a smaller infrastructure-based network of wireless devices embedded in the water distribution network, reports water pressure changes at pipe junctions that may be indicative of leaks that require human intervention. Using realistic topologies derived from experiences with real world community scale deployments, we study the impact of geo-correlated failures on the combined network infrastructure and evaluate a range of GeoCRON heuristics to improve commnunications resilience in this context. We validate the promise of the proposed GeoCRON-based approach using extensive simulations and an initial prototype system implementation.