Graphite Routing: Name-based hierarchical routing for internet-of-things in enterprise environments

Internet of Things in enterprise environments features large numbers of devices deployed in rooms, floors of possibly multiple buildings. Delivering user commands to control devices nearby and multiple hops away requires efficient and scalable routing in such environments. Existing work in ad-hoc, sensor or IoT network routing lacks good human accessibility and scalability. In this paper, we propose a peer-based protocol GraphiteRouting. All devices carry human-readable hierarchical string names for easy reference. It leverages devices' installation hierarchy for scalable hierarchical routing: most devices maintain only a few to dozens of routing entries for same-room devices, and a fraction of devices act as gateways for traffic from/to other rooms, floors or buildings. Also, it leverages users' operation patterns to less optimize infrequently used routes. Extensive analysis and performance evaluation on a 20-node testbed prove that GraphiteRouting is scalable: it has routing tables 10x- -1000x smaller than those in peer-based flat routing; also, upon device joining/leaving, its routing entries converge in less than 5 s, and forwarding a user command over 8 hops costs less than 0.3 s.