Using a DHT in a Peer to Peer Architecture for the Internet of Things

A challenging aspect of The Internet of Things (IoT) is to provide an architecture that can handle the range of IoT elements ranging from Cloud-based applications to constrained nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Such an architecture must be scalable, allow seamless operation across networks and devices with little human intervention. This paper describes a set of abstractions and an architecture for the flow of data from sensors to applications supported by a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and our novel Holistic Peer to Peer (HPP) Application Layer protocol to handle node ids, capabilities, services and sensor data. We show that this architecture can operate in a constrained node by presenting a `C' implementation running on the Contiki3.0 OS and consider the effectiveness of its use of a DHT and its abstractions.