Energy efficiency and robustness for IoT: Building a smart home security system

Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new paradigm in computing in which devices are connected to the internet and directly communicate with each other. Because these devices are generally thought to be wireless, small and cheap, in other words not very reliable, it is vital that we address the robustness problems in IoT. Applying standard fault tolerance models in IoT is impossible. The devices are not only heterogeneous, but unlike compute nodes, different devices have completely different capabilities and serve completely different functions (they have different sensors). We propose a model in which we describe the capabilities of each device and use this information to dynamically replace faulty devices with other, not-directly-compatible ones. Furthermore, our model uses the overlap between device characteristics in order to temporarily disable part of them and preserve energy. We show how the model can be applied on an IoT home security system, where robustness is critical. To offer a concrete example, a system based on our model would use a WiFi scanner, a heat sensor and a door opening sensor in order to replace a faulty security camera.