Towards a Fully Programmable Internet of Things

Abstract

The devices of Internet of Things (IoT) networks can be deployed for extended period of time in inaccessible locations. After their deployment, new features, bug fixes, or changes in the client needs can require an update of the node's behavior, and this update has to be transmitted over the radio medium. Proposals have been made in the literature to apply the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm to wireless sensor networks but they focus on the packet forwarding layer of the stack. In this work, we propose to extend the programmability to the whole stack with a fully programmable device architecture able to handle the runtime programming of every protocol on any hardware. We detail the use of extended finite-state machines (XFSM) on which the architecture is based and their conversion to compact executable bytecode that can be sent over radio. Simulations demonstrate that this architecture can reproduce a protocol from the literature and enable interoperability between programmable nodes and legacy nodes.