A metaverse for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) forms the foundation behind many critical domains and intertwines with every aspect of our lives; consequently, it is crucial for individuals to understand IoT. However, comprehending IoT systems is not straightforward, as these systems are extremely complex due to the amount of required domain knowledge, their intricate dependencies, their vast sales and complexities, their complicated failure models, and their hard-to-reach deployment environment. How can we address this problem? Humans learn and understand things by experiencing and interacting with them. Other fields use metaverses to gain deeper visibility and directly engage with the technologies they need to understand. Therefore, we revisit the fundamental approach of understanding IoT systems, and ask the question of whether we can adapt the concept of a metaverse to enhance our comprehension of these systems. This thesis seeks to answer this question by proposing the design of an architecture for an IoT metaverse, which integrates physical environmental factors into modeling IoT deployment, manages metaverse user interactions in perceived real-time, and provides enhanced visibility into IoT systems, enabling a broader audience to understand them comfortably. Our approach leverages joint analysis and co-execution of hardware, software, and environment abstractions, along with user-centric coordination and synchronization algorithms, to provide its core functions. Additionally, we define a collection of concepts that will allow for stronger formalism in interactions within the IoT metaverse and evaluate our architecture’s ability to support practical workflows through a case study. Based on an implementation and experimental evaluation, we found that 93% of users improved their understanding with our approach, and 97% adapted easily to gaining understanding within this environment. Additionally, our approach demonstrated scalability with minimal overhead in extreme load tests.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Xue, Fan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Caesar, Matthew

• Internet Of Things (iot)
• Metaverse
• Prototyping Environment

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Fan Xue

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125836

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125836