RainCloud: Decentralized Coordination and Communication in Heterogeneous IoT Swarms

TL;DR

RainCloud introduces a decentralized task allocation method for heterogeneous IoT swarms using Ant Colony Optimization, improving scalability and efficiency in dynamic environments without central coordination.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel decentralized coordination strategy for IoT swarms based on ACO, addressing the challenge of autonomous task allocation in a scalable manner.

Findings

ACO finds nodes with minimal hops and messages

ACO scales better than Gossip protocol

Gossip allocates more tasks successfully

Abstract

The increasing volume and complexity of IoT systems demand a transition from the cloud-centric model to a decentralized IoT architecture in the so-called Computing Continuum, with no or minimal reliance on central servers. This paradigm shift, however, raises novel research concerns for decentralized coordination, calling for accurate policies. However, building such strategies is not trivial. Our work aims to relieve the DevOps engineers from this concern and propose a solution for autonomous, decentralized task allocation at runtime for IoT systems. To this end, we present a semantic communication approach and an ad-hoc lightweight coordination strategy based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). We compare the ACO strategy with Random Search and Gossip protocol-based algorithms. We conduct accurate experiments with up to a hundred nodes in both a static and a dynamic environment, i.e., with device outages. We show that ACO finds a matching node with the smallest hops and messages sent. While the Gossip strategy can allocate the most tasks successfully, ACO scales better, thus being a promising candidate for decentralized task coordination in IoT clusters.