A Lightweight Network Discovery Algorithm for Resource-constrained IoT Devices

Abstract

Although quite simple, existing protocols for the IoT suffer from the inflexibility of centralized infrastructures and require several configuration stages. The implementation of these protocols is often prohibitive on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose a distributed lightweight implementation of network discovery for simple IoT devices. Our approach is based on the exchange of symbolic executable code among nodes. Based on this abstraction, we propose an algorithm that makes even IoT resource-constrained nodes able to construct the network topology graph incrementally and without any a priori information about device positioning and presence. The minimal set of executable symbols to be defined on the devices is identified and simulation results for different topologies are reported.