RemedioT: Remedial Actions for Internet-of-Things Conflicts

The increasing complexity and ubiquity of using IoT devices exacerbate the existing programming challenges in smart environments such as smart homes, smart buildings, and smart cities. Recent works have focused on detecting conflicts for the safety and utility of IoT applications, but they usually do not emphasize any means for conflict resolution other than just reporting the conflict to the application user and blocking the conflicting behavior. We propose RemedIoT, a remedial action 1 framework for resolving Internet-of-Things conflicts. The RemedIoT framework uses state of the art techniques to detect if a conflict exists in a given set of distributed IoT applications with respect to a set of policies, i.e., rules that define the allowable and restricted state-space transitions of devices. For each identified conflict, RemedIoT will suggest a set of remedial actions to the user by leveraging RemedIoT's programming abstractions. These programming abstractions enable different realizations of an IoT module while safely providing the same level of utility, e.g., if an air-conditioner application that is used to implement a cooling module conflicts with a CO2 monitor application that requires ventilation at home, a non-conflicting smart fan application will be suggested to the user. We evaluate RemedIoT on Samsung SmartThings applications and IFTTT applets and show that for 102 detected conflicts across 74 sample applications with 11 policies, RemedIoT is able to remediate ~ 80% of the conflicts found in the environment, which would normally be blocked by prior solutions. We further demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of our approach for smart city environments.