Dependable Mesh Networking Patterns

In our daily life, we are increasingly relying on connected systems ranging from smart health care devices to industrial and intelligent transportation systems, as well as smart homes and cities. The unavailability or malfunctioning of these systems could threaten human life, cause environmental damage, and significant financial loss. To prevent such large scale and mission-critical systems from malfunctioning, it is of utmost importance to establish and guaranty reliable connections to attain a dependable networked system. Generally, mesh networking technologies are used for building such systems since mesh networks provide the best performance characteristics regarding fault-tolerance, throughput, resource usage, and service level flexibility. In this paper, we summarize the major challenges in dependable network design, to subsequently present three patterns that approach redundancy on the hardware level, software-defined networking, and cross-cutting concerns like monitoring and service discovery within distributed networked systems. These three patterns should help designers and engineers in choosing the appropriate technologies for building dependable networked systems at all scales. Since dependable network engineering requires a holistic system-wide design and engineering approach, we also present a pattern map guiding to complementary and closely related patterns. System architects and system engineers responsible for building mixed-criticality systems, internet-of-things (IoT), and industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems are the target audience of the patterns presented in this paper.