Distributed Algorithms for Networks Formation in a Scalable Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision that aims at inter-connecting every physical identifiable object (or, a thing) via a global networking infrastructure (e.g., the legacy Internet). Several architectures are proposed to realize this vision; many of which agree that the IoT shall be considered as a global network of networks. These networks are used to manage wireless sensors, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags, RFID readers and other types of electronic devices and integrate them into the IoT. A major requirement of the IoT architectures is scalability, which is the capability of delivering high performance even if the input size (e.g., number of the IoT objects) is large. This thesis studies and proposes solutions to meet this requirement, and specifically focuses on the scalability issues found in the networks of the IoT. The thesis proposes several network formation algorithms to achieve these objectives, where a network formation algorithm is an algorithm that, if applied to a certain network, optimizes it to perform its tasks in a more efficient manner by virtually deleting some of its nodes and/or edges. The thesis focuses on three types of networks found in the IoT: 1) RFID readers coverage networks; whose main task is to cover (i.e., identify, monitor, track, sense) IoT objects located in a given area, 2) readers inter-communications networks; whose main task is to guarantee that their nodes are able to inter-communicate with each other and hence use their resources more efficiently (the thesis specifically considers inter-communication networks of readers using Bluetooth for communications), and 3) Object Name Systems (ONS) which are networks of several inter-connected database servers (i.e., distributed database) whose main task is to resolve an object identifier into an Internet address to enable inter-communication via the Internet. These networks are chosen for several reasons. For example, the technologies and concepts found in these networks are among the major enablers of the IoT. Furthermore, these networks solve tasks that are central to any IoT architecture. Particularly, the thesis a) studies the data and readers redundancy problem found in RFID readers coverage networks and introduces decentralized RFID coverage and readers collisions avoidance algorithms to solve it, b) contributes to the problem of forming multihop inter-communications networks of Bluetooth-equipped readers by proposing decentralized time-efficient Bluetooth Scatternet Formation algorithms, and c) introduces a geographic-aware ONS architecture based on Peer-To-Peer (P2P) computing to overcome weaknesses found in existing ONS architectures