Managing communication congestion for internet of things devices

• US 9,923,821 B2
• Filed: 12/23/2015
• Issued: 03/20/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 12/23/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Original Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Inventors: Nolan, Michael, Nolan, Keith, Kelly, Mark, Brady, John
• Primary Examiner(s): Patel, Hitesh
• Application Number:
  US14/757,743
• Publication Number:
  US 20170187625A1
• Time in Patent Office: 818 Days
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0813 characterised by the conditions triggering a change of settings
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/0876 Network utilisation, e.g. volume of load or congestion level
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/10 Active monitoring, e.g. heartbeat, ping or trace-route
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/103 with adaptive polling, i.e. dynamically adapting the polling rate
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/10 Flow control; Congestion control
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/11 Identifying congestion
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/25 with rate being modified by the source upon detecting a change of network conditions
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/263 Rate modification at the source after receiving feedback
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/12 specially adapted for proprietary or special-purpose networking environments, e.g. medical networks, sensor networks, networks in vehicles or remote metering networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/568 Storing data temporarily at an intermediate stage, e.g. caching
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/70 Services for machine-to-machine communication [M2M] or machine type communication [MTC]

Abstract

A method and apparatus are provided for controlling an internet of things (IoT) device based on a congestion level. An example method includes polling a sensor, writing a measurement to a file, parsing the file to create a message, and checking for a backpressure alert message. If a backpressure alert message is found the message is saved to a cache, and a polling interval is changed.

Claims

1. An apparatus for managing communication congestion for internet of things (IoT) devices coupled to a cloud, the apparatus comprising:

an IoT device, comprising;

a plurality of sensors, each sensor to generate data;

a data transfer controller configured to;

create sensor messages based on the generated data; and

dispatch the sensor messages to a pipeline processing application in the cloud;

a backpressure monitor configured to;

determine congestion in the cloud by sending a tracer message to each component in the cloud, the tracer message being a message whose contents and frequency of dispatch are known, the tracer message to be followed by a response message, wherein either no response or a time-delayed response message indicates congestion; and

accept backpressure alert messages as a result of congestion being detected by the cloud or other IoT devices;

wherein the backpressure monitor is configured to adjust a rate of dispatch of sensor messages from the data transfer controller, a polling interval for polling the plurality of sensors, or both;

a data store configured to buffer sensor messages that cannot be sent due to the congestion; and

a data backlog transfer controller to incrementally transfer sensor messages from the data store, at a replay rate specified by the backpressure monitor, once congestion is abated.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the data store comprises a first capacity and the cloud comprises non-volatile storage of a second capacity, wherein the first capacity is greater than the second capacity.

3. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the IoT device comprises an IoT gateway coupled to a plurality of IoT devices and wherein the IoT gateway is configured to pass sensor messages from the plurality of IoT devices to the pipeline processing application.

4. The apparatus of claim 3, the IoT gateway to allocate a memory to implement a virtual machine, wherein the data transfer controller, the backpressure monitor, and the data store are functional units within the virtual machine.

5. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the incremental transfer of sensor messages to the data store is implemented using a technique, wherein the technique is selected from a group consisting of first-in-first-out, last-in-first-out, and random sampling.

6. A method for controlling an internet of things (IoT) device in communication with a cloud based on a congestion level, c, of one or more components of the cloud, the method comprising:

polling a sensor coupled to the IoT device according to a polling interval, resulting in a sensor measurement;

writing the sensor measurement to a file in an IoT device storage device;

parsing the file to create a message, the message being associated with the sensor measurement, wherein the message is intended to be dispatched to a cloud storage device; and

checking for a backpressure alert message being sent from the cloud, and, if found;

saving the message to a cache memory of the IoT device; and

changing the polling interval using the following equation;

7. The method of claim 6, further comprising if the backpressure alert message is not found:

dispatching the message to the cloud storage device; and

determining if the dispatch was successful, and, if so, moving the file to a processed directory in the IoT storage device.

8. The method of claim 7, further comprising if the dispatch was not successful, saving the message to the cache memory of the IoT device.

9. The method of claim 7, further comprising:

replaying the message from the cache memory of the IoT device by;

checking if a backpressure alert is present at the IoT device, and, if not, requesting the backpressure alert message from the cloud;

calculating a replay rate, r; and

if the replay rate is zero, then iterating checking for the backpressure alert.

10. The method of claim 9, further comprising:

calculating an updated replay rate by the following equation;

r′

=r*f,

wherein r′

denotes the updated replay rate and f denotes a message dispatch frequency; and

replacing the replay rate with the updated replay rate.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein f is once per minute.

12. The method of claim 9, further comprising, if the replay rate is greater than zero:

selecting the message from the cache memory of the IoT device; and

dispatching the message to the cloud storage device.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising checking if the cache memory of the IoT device is empty, and, if not, replaying the message from the cache memory of the IoT device.

14. A non-transitory, computer readable medium comprising instructions to direct a processor to:

check for network congestion by an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway coupled to a cloud, wherein the IoT gateway gathers data from sensors coupled to the IoT gateway, generates messages based on the gathered data, and stores the messages in a local memory cache of the IoT gateway;

receive a backpressure alert from the cloud;

adjust a replay rate of messages stored in the local memory cache of the IoT gateway;

dispatch a message of the cached messages to the cloud once the backpressure alert is no longer received from the cloud; and

adjust a polling interval, p_i, of gathering data from sensors using the following equation;

15. The non-transitory, computer readable medium of claim 14, further comprising instructions to direct the processor to:

request a backpressure alert message from the cloud; and

replay messages stored in the local memory cache of the IoT gateway if no backpressure alert is received.

16. The non-transitory, computer readable medium of claim 15, further comprising instructions to direct the processor to:

replay messages according to one of the following techniques;

first-in-first-out;

last-in-first-out; and

random sampling.

17. An internet of things (IoT) device for managing communication congestion, comprising:

a processor to execute modules loaded into a memory, the modules comprising;

a data transfer controller configured to create sensor messages and dispatch the sensor messages to a pipeline processing application in a cloud;

a backpressure monitor configured to accept backpressure alert messages, wherein the backpressure monitor is configured to adjust a rate of dispatch of sensor messages from the data transfer controller, a polling interval for polling a sensor, or both;

a data store configured to buffer messages that cannot be sent due to the congestion; and

a data backlog transfer controller to incrementally transfer sensor messages from the data store, at a replay rate specified by the backpressure monitor, once congestion is abated;

a data backlog transfer controller to incrementally transfer buffered messages from the data store, at a replay rate calculated by the backpressure monitor;

wherein the messages are buffered locally to avoid overload of cloud storage.

18. The IoT device of claim 17, wherein the data backlog transfer controller implements a means to incrementally transfer buffered messages from the data store, wherein the means is selected from a group consisting of first-in-first-out, last-in-first-out, and random sampling.

19. The IoT device of claim 17, wherein the backpressure monitor is configured to use the following equation to adjust the polling interval, p_i: