On the potentials of object group localization in the Internet of Things

The incessant decrease in size, cost, and energy consumption of wireless devices is likely to boost the number of wireless devices dramatically. These will be deployed in several real world objects that we use in our daily life as envisioned by the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. Designing effective and efficient objects´ location update and search mechanisms, is very important but is extremely difficult in the IoT scenarios. In fact, the number of mobile objects composing the IoT will be huge; this implies that signaling traffic generated for location update and discovery purposes can explode. Also, objects might currently be located where positioning solutions are not available or are not accurate enough to support most of the envisioned added value IoT applications. In this paper it is studied how object group mobility can be exploited to achieve accurate location update and search in the IoT, while reducing the signaling overhead. Object group mobility is a phenomenon that naturally emerges as usually moving objects are carried by a human or a vehicle together with several other objects. In this paper i) the concept of object group mobility is introduced and it is explained how and to which extent this can be used to reduce signaling overhead and improve accuracy in object location information; ii) the concept of collective-agent is introduced to further decrease signaling overhead in the IoT scenarios where object group mobility emerges, iii) an analytical framework is derived to assess the advantages of exploiting object group mobility in IoT scenarios.