Loss-Tolerant Event Communications Within Industrial Internet of Things by Leveraging on Game Theoretic Intelligence

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key technologies paving the way for the next industrial revolution named as Industry 4.0, since it promises to realize smarter factories by optimizing costs and productivity. Traditionally, the adopted communication protocols among the sensors are required to manage the large scale of the infrastructure in terms on the high number of interconnected nodes and the massive volume of exchanged data. However, due to the key role of those Industrial IoT in exchanging business critical data, such protocols need to also provide high resiliency guarantees to the message exchange, with as few delivery misses as possible. The publish/subscribe interaction pattern and the protocol implementing it are a technically sound approach for achieving scalability and elasticity, thanks to their intrinsic decoupling among the interacting nodes. However, they are often unsuitable in their current form, because they provide only best-effort delivery guarantees, or they adopt naive solutions to achieve resilient communication, especially when wireless networks are used. This paper presents a clustered lightweight gossiping algorithm for resilient event-based communications among the sensors, without requiring a predeployed brokering infrastructure supporting the adopted publish/subscribe protocol. A simulation-based assessment has been performed in order to empirically show the improvements in terms of successfully delivered notification without the excessive costs of the state-of-the-art solutions available in the literature.