CHAINMAIL: Distributed Coordination for Multi-task k-Assignment Using Autonomous Mobile IoT Devices

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) becomes more and more pervasive and supports us in our daily activities. However, when individual devices struggle in accomplishing certain tasks, they have to cooperate in order to achieve desired outcomes. In the absence of a central controller, devices have to coordinate autonomously within the network in order to attain and complete as many tasks as possible. We propose CHAINMAIL, a novel, distributed approach to coordinate sensors to attain tasks that cannot be accomplished by single, but only by cooperation of multiple devices. We demonstrate our approach with an IoT case study on multi-object k-coverage with autonomously operating mobile cameras and show that our approach does not over-provision tasks, allowing the remaining devices to attain other duties. This enables our network to provision more tasks in the same time as other comparable solutions.