On Programming Models, Smart Middleware, Cyber-Security and Self-Healing for the Next-Generation Internet-of-Things

Abstract

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is one of the most important new paradigms and technological advances in the realm of the soon-to-be-present-in-every-household (and nearly every business), Internet-powered cyber-physical systems of this decade and likely years to come. We are interested in the distributed intelligence, agent-based programming and multi-agent systems aspects of what it will take to enable the reliable, secure, inter-operable and human-friendly Next-Generation IoT, and in particular, Internet-of-Agents (IoA) as the IoT’s software and computational intelligence foundation. Several key software design and computational intelligence aspects of IoT/IoA are discussed in this paper. We first address suitable programming abstractions for the software agents that would provide IoT’s inter-operability, enabling different users, devices and platforms to effectively communicate and coordinate with each other. We then review some desiderata for the Next-Generation (NG) IoT middleware design. To address cyber-security for IoT holistically, we outline some elements of computational intelligence that would enable the self-healing and self-recovery capabilities of the NG IoT. We argue that the design of NG cyber-defense, self-healing and self-recovering mechanisms could greatly benefit from exploring paradigms from biology – in particular, from the immune systems of living organisms. If such highly adaptable self-healing capabilities were built into the NG IoT, future cyber-attacks would cause much less disruption to the infrastructure and the end-users than what was the case with some recent cyber-attacks on the present-day IoT.