Cells in the Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of cells as fundamental units to unify various perspectives in the Internet of Things, aiming to create a comprehensive model that integrates devices, services, and networks.

Contribution

It proposes the novel concept of cells to serve as a unified vocabulary and structural foundation for modeling the Internet of Things.

Findings

Cells provide a common framework for IoT entities

Various boundary criteria for cells are discussed

Potential for formal modeling of IoT using cells

Abstract

The Internet of Things combines various earlier areas of research. As a result, research on the subject is still organized around these pre-existing areas: distributed computing with services and objects, networks (usually combining 6lowpan with Zigbee etc. for the last-hop), artificial intelligence and semantic web, and human-computer interaction. We are yet to create a unified model that covers all these perspectives - domain, device, service, agent, etc. In this paper, we propose the concept of cells as units of structure and context in the Internet of things. This allows us to have a unified vocabulary to refer to single entities (whether dumb motes, intelligent spimes, or virtual services), intranets of things, and finally the complete Internet of things. The question that naturally follows, is what criteria we choose to demarcate boundaries; we suggest various possible answers to this question. We also mention how this concept ties into the existing visions and protocols, and suggest how it may be used as the foundation of a formal model.