IoTa: A Lean and Efficient Approach to the Internet-of-Things Tejas Wanjari and Ravi Chandra Bandlamudi 18-845, Internet Services, Spring 2015 The Internet-of-Things (IoT) combines Embedded Systems with the Internet, and thus has to deal with the problems that emerge from the interactions of the two. The major problems with current IoT architectures are wastage of compute cycles in low-power devices while managing network reliability, lack of a service to reduce the cloud’s overhead in handling realtime data, the unsuitability of HTTP REST for embedded devices and the existence of the broker in user space in the publish-subscribe model. We propose IoTa (Internet-of-Things architecture) as an approach to deal with these issues. IoTa introduces an extra level of indirection by placing the Machine to Machine (M2M) Gateway between the M2M network and the Internet. The Internet communication overhead is delegated to this gateway. Also, we run the broker on this gateway rather than the cloud server, unlike the traditional approach. We devise a simple TCP-based control plane to replace the HTTP REST API. We implement a proof of concept TCP broker as a kernel module to reduce the broker overhead with respect to system calls and memory footprint. The new architecture is evaluated with respect to the TCP based control protocol and the basic TCP broker kernel module. We observe that the network operations on the M2M nodes are more predictable in IoTa, with respect to time. IoTa is promising approach for heavy workloads over an unreliable Internet network. Thus, IoTa can be considered as a best practice for designing more robust IoTs for similar environments.