Liam: An Architectural Framework for Decentralized IoT Networks

Today's IoT deployments commonly resemble walled gardens: they are closed ecosystems in which manufacturers maintain significant control over devices after they have been deployed. This is typically the result of a centralized design approach where devices heavily rely on a monolithic, vendor-operated cloud service. We propose a distributed architecture that liberates these devices-and their data-by considering IoT devices as first-class network citizens and by grouping them in trusted network zones. These network zones support the devices contained in them by allowing tasks to be delegated from the device to the zone. However, devices are considered to be independent by default, and a task is only delegated when it is impossible or undesirable for the device to perform this task itself. We demonstrate how our architecture allows for novel access-control methods and context-dependent network views.