MoT: A collaborative network troubleshooting platform for the Internet of Things

Troubleshooting network problems on networked home devices is not easy, because most devices have insufficient computing power to run sophisticated diagnostic tools and have no user interfaces to debug the problem directly. We propose MoT, a network problem diagnosis platform that leverages the collaboration of smart objects, smartphones, and computers. We take advantage that recent devices have multiple communication interfaces. Therefore, when a device has a problem with an interface, it can send a probe request to other devices using an alternative interface. We use collaborative mechanisms to diagnose the root cause of a network problem. It can use cooperation from internal nodes or send requests to external nodes. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing an Android application and an algorithm that diagnoses a push notification failure.