A metaverse for the Internet of Things

Xue, Fan

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

Description

Title

A metaverse for the Internet of Things

Author(s)

Xue, Fan

Issue Date

2024-07-17

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Caesar, Matthew

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Internet of Things (IoT)
• metaverse
• prototyping environment

Abstract

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.

Graduation Semester

2024-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

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

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Fan Xue

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