Meerkat: Scalable, Network-Aware Failure Recovery for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) demands real-time, low-latency pro cessing of data generated by thousands of heterogeneous, resource constrained devices. In such dynamic environments, ensuring fault tolerance becomes critical, especially for safety-sensitive applica tions like disaster management or patient monitoring. However, existing centralized fault tolerance solutions face serious scalability challenges across large, hierarchically connected IoTtopologies. In this paper, we present Meerkat, a network-aware fault-tolerance protocol explicitly designed for IoT environments. Meerkat achieves zero-downtime recovery via redundant operator execution on dis joint paths and e cient duplicate detection.Italsoincludesdynamic load balancing that adapts operator placement to device volatility, ensuring fair resource use. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, Meerkat sustains up to 70× higher throughput with only 28% net workoverhead. These results highlight Meerkat’s ability to deliver e cient fault tolerance with minimal overhead at IoT scale.
