Abstract
Internet of Things (IOT) has been regarded as the next market driver in the semiconductor industry in recent years. People are expecting large amount of emerging connected devices sensing the environment, reacting to stimulus and providing various kinds of service. However, as the economic scale and energy is not likely to growth dramatically in the near future, the expected growth of IOT devices and systems will be constrained by total cost and energy consumption. As cost is highly related to reliability, we address the problem by adopting a newly proposed symbiotic system (SS) model, in designing IOT system with repair resources. We also propose a peer-assisted repair mechanism (peer-repair), which allows an IOT device to repair its faulty neighboring devices. With the model and mechanism, we are able to evaluate the reliability and cost of the entire IOT system. Experimental result shows that without replacing faulty devices in the system, the lifetime of the peer-repair enhanced system can be extended by 50%, as compared with the one using only self-repair. In addition, when considering manual replacement in long-term operation, the peer-repair system is able to achieve much lower cost. With a repair resource, the cost of systems with peer-repair is reduced to 50% of those with self-repair, and 10% of those without repair.