A New WSN Mesh Protocol for More Transparent IoT Devices

We are experimenting great advances in the last years towards Weiser’s Ubiquitous Computing vision. To complete his transparent computing vision, we must unnoticed the presence of computing hardware around us. Currently, we are deploying smart devices in our houses to detect e.g., smoke in the kitchen, the state of a window (open or close) and so on. However, these devices require at least an initial configuration to be able to e.g., connect to the Internet through the router and sometimes also to set up some basic parameters. This paper focuses on the way IoT devices are interconnected to be able to interact with other connected devices as well as with people (e.g. to configure them), proposing a solution closer to the Weiser’s vision that is specially necessary for people not able to configure these devices for several reasons, such as elderly people that e.g., do not have the smartphone or PC to do it or are not able to do it due to functional diversity (e.g., problems with their hands for fine-grain control). More specifically, our specific target is people living in rural areas where the technical assistance is also not available and where houses tend to be big with wide stone walls that obstruct radio signals. Trying to solve this situation we propose a new IoT protocol to deal with this situation where people can throw IoT devices to a place with typically several of them already deployed and the nodes will autoconfigure themselves.