Medley: A Novel Distributed Failure Detector for IoT Networks

Efficient and correct operation of an IoT network requires the presence of a failure detector and membership protocol amongst the IoT nodes. This paper presents a new failure detector for IoT settings where nodes are connected via a wireless ad-hoc network. This failure detector, which we name Medley, is fully decentralized, allows IoT nodes to maintain a local membership list of other alive nodes, detects failures quickly (and updates the membership list), and incurs low communication overhead in the underlying ad-hoc network. In order to minimize detection time and communication, we adapt a failure detector originally proposed for datacenters (SWIM), for the IoT environment. In Medley each node picks a medley of ping targets in a randomized and skewed manner, preferring nearer nodes. Via analysis and NS-3 simulation we show the right mix of pinging probabilities that simultaneously optimize detection time and communication traffic. We have also implemented Medley for Raspberry Pis, and present deployment results.