Self-healing and Optimizing of the HIP-based M2M Overlay Network

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm is a novel communication technology under standardization at both the ETSI and the 3GPP. It involves a set of sensors and actuators (M2M devices) communicating with M2M applications via M2M gateways, with no human intervention. For M2M communications trust and privacy are key requirements. This drove us to propose a host identity protocol (HIP) based M2M overlay network, called HBMON, in order to ensure private communications between M2M devices, M2M gateway and M2M applications. In this paper, we first propose to add the self-healing capabilities to the M2M gateways. We enable at the M2M gateway level the REAP protocol, a failure detection and locator pair exploration protocol for IPv6 multihoming nodes. We also add mobility management capabilities to the M2M gateway in order to handle M2M devices mobility. Furthermore, in this paper we add the self-optimization capabilities to the M2M gateways. We also modify the REAP protocol to continuously monitor the overlay paths in order to always select the best available one in term of RTT. We implement our solution on the OMNeT++ network simulator. Results highlight the novel gateway capabilities: it recovers from failures, handle mobility and always select the best available path.