xDIoT: Leveraging Reliable Cross-domain Communication Across IoT Networks

We propose xDIoT, a paradigm for reliable cross-domain communication across separated IoT network domains over some public network such as the Internet. Depending on use-case scenarios, several individual IoT domains, each consisting of heterogeneous end-devices (sensors and actuators) are deployed across geographical regions. When these domains need to communicate with one another they can use an intermediate public network like the Internet. To this end, a standard paradigm is required for such inter-domain communication over public networks to reduce latencies and prevent inconsistencies, which is absent in current deployments. With xDIoT we address this issue to provide a uniform communication paradigm. In xDIoT, each individual domain has an associated gateway access point (AP) acting as the bridge between the intra-domain IoT network and the external public network. These APs perform Domain Information Exchange through JSON format to gain knowledge about each other and use a generalized packet header structure to encapsulate all data flowing between these APs. Through the use of JSON data exchange and the proposed packet header, the APs can perform seamless inter-domain communication. Implementation and analysis show that xDIoT achieves about 10% improvement in total communication latency with 80% improvement in packet processing time at individual gateway APs.