The Network As a Computer: A Framework for Distributed Computing Over IoT Mesh Networks

Ultradense Internet of Things (IoT) mesh networks and machine-to-machine communications herald an enormous opportunity for new computing paradigms and are serving as a catalyst for profound change in the evolution of the Internet. The collective computation capability of these IoT devices is typically neglected in favor of cloud or edge processing. We propose a framework to tap into this resource pool by coupling data communication and processing. Raw data captured by sensing devices can be aggregated and transformed into appropriate actions as it travels along the network toward actuating nodes. This paper presents an element of this vision, whereby we map the operations of an artificial neural network onto the communication of a multihop IoT network for simultaneous data transfer and processing. By exploiting the principle of locality inherent to many IoT applications, the proposed approach can reduce the latency in delivering processed information. Furthermore, it improves the distribution of energy consumption across the IoT network compared to a centralized processing scenario, thus mitigating the “energy hole” effect and extending the overall lifetime of the system.