Thoughts on Reliability in the Internet of Things

This paper discusses the role of reliability in networks dedicated to the observation and management of objects in the physical world, the “Internet of Things”. The Internet of Things differs from today’s global Internet in a number of ways. For instance, the networks are typically unmanaged, many applications are safety critical, the link layers are optimized for low power usage, and most nodes have to be implementable in a lightweight manner. The authors draw on their experiences of designing and deploying such networks, and provide some architectural guidelines to deal with reliability issues from packet transmission to network lifetime and application behavior.