Centre for Unified Computing - Doctoral Theses
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Item A holistic architecture using peer to peer (P2P) protocols for the internet of things and wireless sensor networks(University College Cork, 2020-02) Tracey, David; Sreenan, Cormac J.; Sa Silva, JorgeWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) interact with the physical world using sensing and/or actuation. The wireless capability of WSN nodes allows them to be deployed close to the sensed phenomenon. Cheaper processing power and the use of micro IP stacks allow nodes to form an “Internet of Things” (IoT) integrating the physical world with the Internet in a distributed system of devices and applications. Applications using the sensor data may be located across the Internet from the sensor network, allowing Cloud services and Big Data approaches to store and analyse this data in a scalable manner, supported by new approaches in the area of fog and edge computing. Furthermore, the use of protocols such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and data models such as IPSO Smart Objects have supported the adoption of IoT in a range of scenarios. IoT has the potential to become a realisation of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing where tiny networked computers become woven into everyday life. This presents the challenge of being able to scale the technology down to resource-constrained devices and to scale it up to billions of devices. This will require seamless interoperability and abstractions that can support applications on Cloud services and also on node devices with constrained computing and memory capabilities, limited development environments and requirements on energy consumption. This thesis proposes a holistic architecture using concepts from tuple-spaces and overlay Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. This architecture is termed as holistic, because it considers the flow of the data from sensors through to services. The key contributions of this work are: development of a set of architectural abstractions to provide application layer interoperability, a novel cache algorithm supporting leases, a tuple-space based data store for local and remote data and a Peer to Peer (P2P) protocol with an innovative use of a DHT in building an overlay network. All these elements are designed for implementation on a resource constrained node and to be extensible to server environments, which is shown in a prototype implementation. This provides the basis for a new P2P holistic approach that will allow Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT to operate in a self-organising ad hoc manner in order to deliver the promise of IoT.