Towards Resilient Internet of Things: Vision, Challenges, and Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) systems open up massive versatility and opportunity to our world. Providing solutions for smart cities, healthcare, energy, and mobility, such systems increasingly permeate critical aspects of human activity. In a flourish of growth, these complex systems run software, are dynamic, without stable spatial and temporal boundaries, and involve mostly independent software components with different lifespans and evolution models. IoT systems provide data-centric, device-centric and service-centric functionalities that are subject to continuous disruption, under limitations such as resource-constrained devices, platforms heterogeneity, deployment in adverse environments and administrative domains. As these systems evolve and gain complexity, resilience becomes a crucial system property. Bolstering resilience entails understanding and systematically managing dynamic behavior and decentralizing operations. We advocate that to systematically engineer resilience in IoT systems, a complete rethink is necessary regarding their design and operation. In this paradigm shift, systems demand conceptual frameworks, techniques, and mathematically-backed formalisms to treat change and achieve decentralization. We outline a vision for addressing fundamental challenges that software engineering and distributed systems research encounters when building resilient IoT systems. Within a roadmap, we identify techniques and methods that can be leveraged to maintain resilience in the face of disruption, especially in the absence of central control and persistently at the system's runtime.