Leveraging proximity services for relay device discovery in user-provided IoT networks

Since installing cellular interfaces on a huge number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is expensive, we propose to use a user equipment (UE) with a local wireless interface as a mobile IoT gateway for fixed IoT devices. In this paper, we design a new mobile architecture based on name-based communications. However, due to UEs´ mobility and short range of Wi-Fi communication, discovering such an UE, which we call a relay UE, is difficult and a brute discovery incurs large communication overheads. Thus we propose a light-weight relay UE discovery mechanism by leveraging proximity services (ProSe) to achieve low overheads of discovery messages.