Application-layer Internetworking for the Internet of Things

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The explosive increase of network-enabled sensors, actuators, and other cyber-physical systems, referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), together with the proliferation of proprietary network infrastructures that largely bypass the public Internet, requires new solutions for interconnecting large numbers of heterogeneous networks. This project seeks to develop an internetworking architecture that is based on self-organizing application-layer networks. Self-organizing means that devices use all their communication modalities to detect and establish connectivity with other devices to form a network. All nodes of an application-layer network participate in relaying data between sources and destinations of information. Application-layer internetworking refers to the interconnection of devices with attachment points in different network infrastructures at the level of application programs. The long-term objective of this project is to explore the foundations of application-layer internetworking and develop new protocol solutions that enable and facilitate such internetworking. The project will address challenges of integrating low-power IoT devices into the novel internetworking architecture, and addresses scalable routing, resilience to failures, and network policies. The proposed research program seeks to make contributions to a future of highly interconnected networks of IoT and legacy devices. A separate thrust, but an integral part of the project, is the development of new traffic control algorithms using the framework of network calculus theory. Novel trends in technology, such as the ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) service in 5G networks, have increased the demand for novel scheduling and shaping algorithms. We seek to design algorithms that are based on the sound mathematical principles of the network calculus and that allow an efficient implementation in deployed systems. Doing so we seek to develop theoretical underpinnings for  scheduling and shaping algorithms in modern communication networks. By providing implementations of the developed scheduling and shaping methods, the project seeks to close the gap between the outcome of academic research and deployable technologies. Research activities of this project involve theoretical and experimental research, including the design of algorithms, protocol design and implementation, as well as analytical performance evaluation, simulations, and measurement experiments.