CNS Core: Small: GoT -- Groups of Things Abstractions for Distributed IoT

智能家居、建筑和城市的物联网（IoT）市场预计到2021年将达到5000多亿美元的规模。今天的物联网技术格局是几十年研究的顶峰，但大规模物联网部署仍然很难设置，配置和管理，而且这个过程通常是费力和耗时的。该项目将开发一种新的分布式计算基底，称为“物联网（GoT）”。 GoT由几个软件构建模块组成，在此基础上可以轻松灵活地为智能家居、建筑、校园和城市等环境构建物联网应用程序，使我们更接近实现这些部署真正强大、可扩展、自给自足和自我管理的愿景。GoT为物联网环境调整了三个重要的分布式计算原语，这些原语在数据中心和云计算中取得了成功，即成员资格、协调和存储。该项目在GoT之上构建的应用程序提供了一个机会，可以探索以人为本的理念设计系统的方法，用于物联网环境。 该项目的活动包括设计算法，正式分析它们，在包括Raspberry Pis在内的真实的设备中实现它们，并在伊利诺伊大学校园的真实的建筑中部署它们。该项目将开发开放式软件，并与物联网和无线领域的行业合作，以最大限度地发挥项目创意的行业影响力。教育贡献包括为在线MOOC开发模块，并与K-12，本科和研究生院代表性不足的群体的学生合作。 从技术上讲，该项目将为物联网网络构建一个新的抽象，称为“物联网（GoT）”底层。工作包括设计和分析新的分布式算法，技术，系统和实现，用于三个特定的基础构建块：1）物联网网络中的分布式故障检测和成员资格; 2）物联网网络中的分布式协调; 3）分布式物联网小对象存储（iSoS）。这三个组件的解决方案紧密集成，相互利用（后者建立在前者之上）。由于物联网环境的流动性和易故障性，该项目的理念是使用概率技术进行设计-此类技术已被证明在基于互联网的分布式系统（如云和数据中心）中工作良好。这些技术是可分析的，并且在各种场景中具有可证明的行为。 研究人员还将在GoT基底上实现应用程序，包括第一个分布式命令和控制接口，该接口实现了受事务数据库启发的ACID抽象（原子性，一致性，隔离性，持久性）。该项目的实施将在最先进的物联网平台，如树莓派。实验将通过使用模拟的真实的痕迹和使用伊利诺伊大学校园内建筑物内的真实的部署进行。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Internet of things (IoT) market for smart homes, buildings, and cities, is expected to reach over a half trillion dollars in size by 2021. Today's IoT technology landscape is the culmination of many decades of research, but large-scale IoT deployments are still hard to setup, configure, and manage, and this process is often laborious and time-consuming. This project will develop a new distributed computing substrate called "Groups of Things (GoT)". GoT consists of several software building blocks on top of which IoT applications can be built easily and flexibly for environments like smart homes, buildings, campuses, and cities, bringing us closer to the vision of making these deployments truly robust, scalable, self-sufficient, and self-managing. GoT adapts, for IoT settings, three important distributed computing primitives that have been successful in datacenters and cloud computing, namely--membership, coordination, and storage. The applications built by this project atop GoT provide an opportunity to explore the approach of designing systems with a human-first philosophy, for the IoT setting. The project's activities include designing algorithms, analyzing them formally, implementing them in real devices including Raspberry Pis, and deploying them in real buildings on the University of Illinois campus. The project will produce open software and engage with industry in the IoT and wireless sector to maximize industry impact of ideas from the project. Educational contributions include developing modules for online MOOCs and working with students from under-represented groups in K-12, undergraduate school, and graduate school. Technically, this project will build a new abstraction for IoT Networks, called the "Groups of Things (GoT)" substrate. The work includes designing and analyzing new distributed algorithms, techniques, and systems and implementations, for three specific foundational building blocks: 1) distributed failure detection and membership in IoT networks; 2) distributed coordination in IoT networks; and 3) distributed IoT small object storage (iSoS). The solutions to these three components are tightly integrated, leveraging each other (latter ones build atop former ones). Because of the fluid and failure-prone nature of IoT environments, the project's philosophy is to design using probabilistic techniques--such techniques have been shown to work well in internet-based distributed systems (such as clouds and datacenters). These techniques are analyzable and have provable behavior in a variety of scenarios. The researchers will also implement applications atop the GoT substrate, including the first distributed command and control interface that realizes ACID abstractions (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) inspired by transactional databases. The project's implementations will be in state-of-the-art IoT platforms such as Raspberry Pis. Experiments will be performed via both real traces using a simulation and using real deployments inside buildings at the University of Illinois campus.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.