IoTranx: Transactions for Safer Smart Spaces

Smart spaces such as smart homes deliver digital services to optimize space use and enhance user experience. They are composed of an Internet of Things (IoT), people, and physical content. They differ from traditional computer systems in that their cyber-physical nature ties intimately with the users and the built environment. The impact of ill-programmed applications in such spaces goes beyond loss of data or a computer crash, risking potentially physical harm to the space and its users. Ensuring smart space safety is therefore critically important to successfully deliver intimate and convenient services surrounding our daily lives. By modeling smart space as a highly dynamic database, we present IoT Transactions, an analogy to database transactions, as an abstraction for programming and executing the services as the handling of the devices in smart space. Unlike traditional database management systems that take a “clear room approach,” smart spaces take a “dirty room approach” where imperfection and unattainability of full control and guarantees are the new normal. We identify Atomicity, Isolation, Integrity and Durability (AI 2 D) as the set of properties necessary to define the safe runtime behavior for IoT transactions for maintaining “permissible device settings” of execution and to avoid or detect and resolve “impermissible settings.” Furthermore, we introduce a lock protocol, utilizing variations of lock concepts, that enforces AI 2 D safety properties during transaction processing. We show a brief proof of the protocol correctness and a detailed analytical model to evaluate its performance.