Decentralized fault tolerance mechanism for intelligent IoT/M2M middleware

Abstract

Failover for service-oriented distributed networks is a prerequisite to enabling Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the sense of deploy-once, run forever. Resource reconfiguration is required to achieve failover mechanisms upon replacement of devices or failure of services. It can be particularly challenging when services in applications have more than end-to-end transmissions between devices that are heterogeneous or versatile, for which duplications can be costly and redundant. Specifically, a device with a failed service shall be taken over by another service peer without users', including developers and installers, involvement. We develop the fault tolerance mechanism for IoT, which is distributed and takes into account the dynamics within IoT. Strip is introduced to store a list of duplicated services, and, each service peer maintains a consistent view of duplicated services in the strip. In combination with the heartbeat protocol, recovery from failure can be achieved by manipulating strips in a distributed manner. Experiments using Arduino Mega 2560 compatible devices show that our approach is capable of failover in small networks, whereas experiments in larger networks are underway. The results show that the faulures can be recovered within few seconds without administrator or developers in the loop.