A formal consensus-based distributed monitoring approach for mobile IoT networks

Internet of Things (IoT) represent a significant area of network research due to the many opportunities derived from the problematics and applications. The most recurring problematics are the mobility, the availability and also the limited resources. A well-known interest in networks and therefore in IoT is to monitor properties of the network and nodes [1, 2]. The problematics can have a significant impact on the monitoring efforts. Mobility and availability can create incomplete results for the monitoring. It can also represent a challenge to monitor distributed properties. The literature states that accuracy is not always reliable and difficult to achieve due to dynamic properties of the IoT in particular with M2M communications and mobile devices. Therefore we propose a distributed monitoring architecture that relies on multiple points of observation. It provides a consensus mechanism that allows it to aggregate and provides a more meaningful and accurate result. We support our proposal with numerous mathematical definitions that model local results for a single node and global results for the network. Finally, we evaluate our architecture with an emulator that relies on AWS, NS3, and Docker with varying number of nodes, network size, network density, speed, mobility algorithms and timeouts. We obtain very promising results, especially regarding accuracy.