Chinese Journal of Electronics

Vol.25, No.2, Mar. 2016

A Stochastic Approach of Dependency Evaluation

for IoT Devices∗
HUANG Jiwei, CHEN Guo and CHENG Bo
(State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
Beijing 100876, China)

Abstract — Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging
technique that offers advanced connectivity of devices, sys-
tems, services, and human beings. With the rapid develop-
ment of hardware and network technologies, the IoT can
refer to a wide variety and large number of devices, result-
ing in complex relationships among IoT devices. The de-
pendencies among IoT devices, which reflect their relation-
ships, are with reference value for the design, development
and management of IoT devices. This paper proposes a
stochastic model based approach for evaluating the depen-
dencies of IoT devices. A random walk model is proposed
to describe the relationships of IoT devices, and its corre-
sponding Markov chain is obtained for dependency analy-
sis. A framework as well as schemes and algorithms for de-
pendency evaluation in real-world IoT are designed based
on traffic measurement. Simulation experiments based on
real-life data extracted from smart home environments are
conducted to illustrate the efficacy of the approach.
Key words — Internet of things (IoT), Dependency,
Random walk, Markov chain.
I. Introduction
The Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging concept,
which is expected to provide advanced connectivity of de-
vices, systems, and services that goes beyond Machine-
to-machine (M2M) communications and covers a variety
of protocols, domains, and applications[1] . With the rapid
development of the underlying techniques related to the
IoT such as electronics, sensors, networking, embedded
systems, and upper-layer software, the IoT has started to
achieve great value and service by exchanging data with
the manufacturer, operator and/or connected devices. It
has become widely used in many aspects of human life,
such as industrial manufacturing, medical and health-
care systems, environmental monitoring, transportation,
building and home automation, etc.
∗ Manuscript Received Aug. 31, 2015; Accepted Oct. 28, 2015. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
The IoT consists of a large number of devices, of-
fering a wide variety of functionalities to meet user de-
mands. Furthermore, the IoT devices can cooperate with
others to fulfill some complex functionalities that a sin-
gle one does not have, such as data fusion with multi-
dimensional sensor data or collaborations in manufactur-
ing systems, leading to the complicated relationships be-
tween IoT devices. Such relationships, which can be de-
scribed by dependencies among IoT devices, can provide
both system/application developers and managers with a
better understanding of the characteristics and behaviors
of devices in the IoT. Therefore, the modeling, analysis,
and measurement of dependencies between IoT devices
are with reference value for the design, development and
management of IoT devices and services.
With the increasing number of devices in the IoT,
the behavior of the devices and the services shows high
dynamics[2] , and thus can be regarded as stochastic pro-
cesses from the top-down viewpoint. Studying the depen-
dency problem using statistic and stochastic theories can
provide us with a valuable understanding of the IoT from
a systematic point of view. Therefore, this paper models
the dependencies of IoT devices as random walks, and
presents their corresponding Markov chains for quantita-
tive analysis of the dependencies. Furthermore, in order
to evaluate the dependencies in real-life IoT systems, a
framework based on traffic measurement is proposed, and
algorithms for obtaining dependency metrics are intro-
duced. Finally, simulation experiments based on data set
from real-world smart home environments are conducted
to validate the effectiveness of our approaches.
The contribution of this paper is mainly twofold as
follows:

China (No.61502043 and No.61132001), National High-tech R&D Program of China (863 Program) (No.2013AA102301), Beijing Natural
Science Foundation (No.4162042), BeiJing Talents Fund (No.2015000020124G082), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (No.2015RC22).
c 2016 Chinese Institute of Electronics. DOI:10.1049/cje.2016.03.003
210 Chinese Journal of Electronics
• We study the dependency problem from a stochastic
angle. The relationships between IoT devices are modeled
by stochastic processes, and statistic theory is applied to
provide quantitative analyses. Evaluating the dependen-
cies from a top-down point of view can provide the system
designers and managers with insights of the behaviors of
the IoT devices, helping them to better the designs and
implementations.
• A traffic-based approach is designed for evaluating
the dependencies in the IoT. Since our evaluation is con-
ducted at network layer, it is able to overcome the high
heterogeneity of the IoT devices and can be applied to
any type of IoT system.
II. Related Work
IoT is an emerging technique which is being widely
applied in several aspects of our daily life. With the rapid
development of IoT technology, researchers have begun
to realize that there are a great number of innovative op-
portunities if the IoT devices can work together. Li and
Sun[3] proposed a semantic-based approach of IoT service
mining for in-depth applications in the IoT. Byun et al.[4]
applied ontology techniques for describing IoT function-
alities, and studied the social relationships among people
and smart things. Choi et al.[5] presented a distributed
coordination scheme for IoT-based services in order to
improve the scalability and efficiency of service collabo-
ration. Liu et al.[6] used a function graph to model the
composite services deployed on smart devices, and fur-
ther considered Quality of service (QoS) in their service
composition. Although all these existing works showed the
powerful strength when IoT devices work cooperatively,
the research on the relationships among IoT devices re-
mains unexplored.
It has been stated in Ref.[7] that the interactions be-
tween smart devices start to show social properties. Since
IoT devices appear significant dynamics with time[8] ,
some stochastic approaches from statistical viewpoints for
(social) network analysis may be with reference value[9] .
Thurner and Biely[10] used random graph theory to study
the state probabilities of network systems. Wang et al.[11]
applied a generalized Markov graph model to network
analysis, providing new insights into the characteristics
of social networks. Also, some methodologies for depen-
dency evaluation in other backgrounds may provide us
some insights. Alinaghi et al.[12] presented a quantita-
tive approach for dependency evaluation of agent oriented
methodologies to guide software development. The exist-
ing researches guide us to study the IoT quantitatively
from a statistical angle, however, how to apply related
theories and models to dependency evaluation in IoT re-
mains unsolved. In this paper, we make an attempt at fill-
ing this gap, and present stochastic models and schemes
2016
for dependency evaluation for IoT devices which will be
described in detail in the following sections.
III. Dependency Model for IoT Devices
1. Random walk model
We suppose there are n devices to be evaluated in (a
subset of) the IoT, denoted by a set D = {1, 2, . . . , n}.
From a statistic point of view, the dependency of two IoT
devices i, j ∈ D can be described by the probability that
one device behaves relying on the other, expressed by pij
and pji . Here, pij represents the fraction of times that de-

vice i is dependant on device j, and j pij = 1. Since the
devices may be invoked by different applications/devices
in different scenarios, both pij and pji take their values
from 0 to 1, and pij = pji may hold.
Therefore, the relationships among the IoT devices
can be indicated by a directed graph G = (V, E). The
vertices V represent the set of devices that need to be
evaluated, i.e., V = D, and the edges E denotes their
invoking relationships. An edge from vertex i to vertex j
can be expressed by a 3-tuple eij = i, j, pij , where the
edge’s weight is assigned by the probability pij . Thus, the
dynamic invocations between IoT devices can be repre-
sented by random walks on the graph G, where at each
step the location jumps from i to another site j according
to the probability distribution of pij . Hence, the steady-
state probabilistic distribution of each state in the random
walks can represent the importance of the corresponding
device.
2. Primitive Markov model for random walks
We let St represent the state of the random walk
process at time epoch t, and Xt = St+1 − St . Recall
that the transitions are Independent and identically dis-
tributed (i.i.d.) random variables, for any set of integers
b, b0 , b1 , . . . bm , we have the following equations, which
show the memoryless property of the process.
Pr(Sm+n = b|S0 = b0 , S1 = b1 , . . . , Sm = bm )
m+n

= Pr( Xt = b − b m )
t=m+1
= Pr(Sm+n = b|Sm = bm )

Moreover, as we already have j pij = 1 for all
i ∈ D, the random walk can be regarded as a Discrete-
time Markov chain (DTMC). The transition matrix P
of the Markov chain is time-independent, where Pij =
Pr(St+1 = j|St = i) = pij . Therefore, we are able to
obtain the steady-state probabilities of the states π =
[π1 , π2 , . . . , πn ] using the following equations, where 1 is
a column of ones.

π·P =π
(1)
π·1= 1
 A Stochastic Approach of Dependency Evaluation for IoT Devices
3. Complemental Markov model for depen-
dency evaluation
Although the above model works in most of the sce-
narios, it has to be further discussed and advanced, es-
pecially for the convergence issue to the stationary distri-
bution. A typical example that fails our model is an IoT
device which does not depend on any other device in the
IoT while being relied on by some other devices. Such de-
vice acts as an absorbing state of the Markov chain, which
pulls all the stationary distribution towards it resulting in
its steady-state probability being 1 while the others being
0. Therefore, our model has to be well dealt with in order
to adapt to all the situations in IoT.
After deep thinking about the characteristics of IoT,
we find that not only the interrelationships between IoT
devices affect their dependencies, but also the upper-layer
applications have some influence on the devices at cer-
tain level. For instance, the applications initially activate
a certain one of the devices to start a workflow in IoT,
making it more important to others because of its ini-
tial position in a workflow. Furthermore, the device at
the end of a workflow, although not depended by other
devices, is relied on by applications, which might be a
key to start a new service (workflow) at an upper layer.
Therefore, the upper-layer applications should be care-
fully considered when evaluating the dependencies of IoT
devices, and additionally their involvements can solve the
convergence issue which will be shown in the following
discussions.
In our model, when an IoT device is initially invoked
by an application, we regard such device depends on the
upper-layer applications. Such complemental modification
to our original model makes it possible of the initial state
in the random walks to jump out of itself, and thus ab-
sorbing states can be eliminated. On the other hand, if a
device is at the end of a workflow, we say it is depended
by the upper-layer applications. The transitions from ap-
plications to devices are able to avoid the existence of
nonrecurrent states in the Markov chains. Therefore, our
complemental DTMC is irreducible, and thus its proba-
bilistic distribution is stationary.
Mathematically, the transition probabilities in our
complemental Markov model is defined by the following
expression.
pij = (1 − pi∗ ) · pij + pi∗ · p∗j (2)
Here, we define pi∗ as the fraction of time that device i de-
pends on the upper-layer applications comparing to other
devices, and p∗j as the fraction of time that device j is
depended by the upper-layer applications within all the
n
depended devices, letting j=1 p∗j = 1 hold. Therefore,
n
it is obvious that j=1 pij = 1, and thus we obtain a com-
plemental DTMC with the updated transition probability
211
matrix P  = [pij ]n×n .
IV. Approach for Dependency Evaluation
1. Framework
In IoT systems, most of the interactions among IoT
devices are initiated by upper-layer applications, aiming
to cooperate the devices in order to meet users’ functional
requirements. However, evaluating dependencies at appli-
cation layer is impractical in reality, because the mea-
surement programs have to be designed and implemented
within the upper-layer softwares and vary significantly
with different applications. Therefore, since various types
of applications have been deployed in the IoT, our ap-
proach is built at the network layer instead of the appli-
cation one, in order to improve the generality by avoiding
detailed interactions or tedious coding with different ap-
plications. As traffic measurement has been widely used
in traditional Internet for application identification and
performance evaluation[13] , we borrow such idea to de-
pendency evaluation in IoT environments.
Fig.1 shows the basic framework of our approach. A
measurement server is deployed on the network layer,
and interacts with the networking equipments (routers or
switches) gathering traffic information among the IoT de-
vices and the upper-layer applications. The traffic is cat-
egorized into two parts, i.e., interior traffic and exterior
traffic. The former one represents the network traffic be-
tween all the IoT devices, while the latter one denotes the
traffic between IoT devices and the upper-layer applica-
tions that invoke them. The interior traffic is used to build
our primitive Markov model for random walks between
IoT devices with transition matrix P , and the model will
be further complemented by the scheme presented in the
above section using the information extracted from the ex-
terior traffic. With the complemental Markov model, the
dependencies between IoT devices is calculated by solv-
ing the Markov model, which will be finally stored in the
database on the server.
Fig. 1. Framework of Dependency Evaluation
212 Chinese Journal of Electronics
2. Schemes and algorithms
1) Traffic measurement
The server connects to the networking equipments in
the IoT, continuously gathering traffic information. Such
process can be done from two aspects. On one hand, the
measurement of the traffic in IoT can be conducted in
a by-pass manner, which captures and analyzes network
packages at the individual server. Examples of such mea-
surement tools are libpcap on Linux platforms and win-
pcap in Windows systems. On the other hand, our ap-
proach can be deployed directly on the routers when they
are equipped with full functionalities of calculation and
storage. An example is to implement our approach in a
software-defined router and run our algorithms simulta-
neously with routing.
The Markov dependency model can be built from the
traffic information obtained by the server. The interior
traffic within the IoT devices are stored in a matrix de-
noted by T = [tij ]n×n , whose element tij represents the
traffic information from device i to j. tij can be denoted by
the amount of network traffic through the router when we
aim to analyze the characteristics of the IoT from a net-
working point of view, or by the time of invoking (number
of flows from device i to j) when we concern the problem
more on the application layer. The exterior traffic is stored
by vectors A = [a1 , a2 , . . . , an ] and D = [d1 , d2 , . . . , dn ],
which indicate the arrival and departure traffic informa-
tion to/from the devices respectively. Also, their calcula-
tion can be conducted in either networking or application
way.
With all the traffic information, we are able to obtain
the model parameters as follows. Since the interior traffic
shows the interrelationships within the IoT devices, we
build the primitive Markov model from them using the
following expression.
tji
pij = n (3)
 of the transition matrix, and its associated eigenvector
tki
k=1
Considering the upper-layer applications, one can obtain
the complemental model with additional A and D using
Eq.(2). The calculations of the parameters pi∗ and p∗j are
shown as follows.
ai
pi∗ = n (4)
 with the recent steady-state probabilities upon updating.
ai + tki
k=1
dj
p∗j = n (5)
 1. Dataset and experimental setup
dk
k=1
2) Solving Markov model
2016
Using the Markov chain with transition matrix P  ,
our approach next calculates the steady-state probabil-
ity of each state to evaluate the importance of each de-
vice. The calculation is to solve the linear equations ex-
pressed by Eq.(1) using computational methods. An in-
tuitive way is to find the steady-state probabilities π it-
eratively, shown by Algorithm 1. Such approach is able
to find the ε-stationary steady-state probability of each
state of the DTMC.
Algorithm 1 Iterative algorithm for solving Markov model
1: Select an arbitrary π0 subject to π0 · 1 = 1;
2: for t ← 0 to ∞ do
3: πt+1 ← πt · P 
` ´1/2
4: if (πt+1 − πt ) · (πt+1 − πt )T < ε then
5: return πt+1
6: end if
7: end for
During the evaluation processes, if the traffic infor-
mation is updated, our approach has to recalculate the
stationary distributions. However, we restart the itera-
tion from the stationary distribution of the Markov chain
before updating, which can significantly accelerate the it-
erations in most of the cases. Since usually only a small
part of the devices are involved in an update, the up-
dated stationary distribution is in some sense close to the
original one, and thus our approach is able to produce
an accurate approximation to π in fewer iterations than
are required when using an arbitrary initial vector. More
specifically, it has been proved that the asymptotic rate of
convergence of the iterations is R = − log |λ2 |, where λ2
is the subdominant eigenvalue of the updated transition
probability matrix[14] .
Another approach for solve the Markov model is to
transform the problem into eigenvector calculation. After
simple transformation from Eq.(1), we are able to draw
the conclusions that one is an eigenvalue of the transpose
equals to π. Therefore, we can apply numerical analysis
methods which have been studied for decades. Examples
include some well-known approaches such as Power it-
eration or Inverse iteration, as well as some recent devel-
oped techniques with faster speed, i.e., Multiple relatively
robust representations (MRRR)[15] . Also, the iterations
in eigenvector calculations can be accelerated by starting
V. Empirical Evaluation
In order to validate the effectiveness of our approach
in real IoT environments, we conduct simulation experi-
ments based on an open-source IoT dataset from a real-
 A Stochastic Approach of Dependency Evaluation for IoT Devices
world smart home environment[16] . Such data set is col-
lected by 161 sensors in two different smart home apart-
ments for continuously 14 days, in which more than 1,000
pieces of data are recorded involving more than 200 ac-
tivities in human daily lives.
Using the activity information from the dataset, one
can obtain the invoking relationships between IoT devices
in each activity by measuring the interior traffic among
the devices. On the other hand, the exterior traffic can
be acquired by analyzing the information of the first and
the last devices in each activity. After aggregating all the
information from measurements, we are able to obtain the
complemental Markov model, and thus the dependencies
can be analyzed quantitatively by the calculations intro-
duced in the previous sections.
2. Experimental results
We build Markov models for the IoT devices in both
of the two apartments. Fig.2 illuminates a typical lunch-
preparing scenario in daily lives of residents in one the
the apartments. Such scenario consists of a workflow in-
volving four IoT devices. Firstly two different refrigerators
are invoked, followed by a freezer. After that, the refrig-
erator numbered 91 is used again after the freezer gets
closed. Finally, a microwave is invoked twice before fin-
ishing preparing the dinner.
Fig. 2. Experimental result of a typical lunch-preparing sce-
nario
In Fig.2, the solid arrows represent the transitions of
the initial traffic among IoT devices, and the numbers la-
beled on the arrows show the transition probabilities in
the workflow, i.e., normalized tij obtained by the initial
measurements of our approach. Upon quantitative analy-
sis of all the transition probabilities, we obtain the tran-
sition probabilities of the primitive Markov model (pij )
using Eq.(3), and thus we have the model parameters
of the complemental Markov model (pij ) with equations
Eqs.(2), (4) and (5). The transition probabilities of the
complemental model are illuminated by the dashed ar-
rows in Fig.2.
213
Furthermore, the steady-state probabilities of the IoT
devices in the complemental Markov models are obtained
using Algorithm 1. We sort such probabilities in each of
the two smart home environments and then show the top-
20 ones with their corresponding device ID, by Figs.3 and
4. From what we obtained with our model, it is quite clear
which devices are more important (depended by other de-
vices) in the IoT environments. Due to different rules and
habits of their daily lives, the steady-state probabilities
vary in different smart home apartments. We see that the
hot water faucet is the most important device in the first
apartment, while such device only ranks 16 in the second
apartment. Meanwhile, some types of devices are popular
in both of the two apartments, such as the refrigerator,
cold water faucet, shower faucet, etc. Thus, since such
top-important devices have significant influence on daily
lives, we may conclude that they should be carefully de-
signed and maintained for guaranteeing the Quality of
service (QoS) of the smart home IoT. Our approach is to
provide guidance for the design and management of IoT
devices.
Fig. 3. Top-20 steady-state probabilities of IoT devices in
apartment 1
Fig. 4. Top-20 steady-state probabilities of IoT devices in
apartment 2
VI. Conclusion
Dependency evaluation is an important procedure for
understanding complex relationships among IoT devices,
especially in large-scale heterogenous IoT environments.
With the increasing number and variety of IoT devices,
their relationships show high dynamics and stochastic
characteristics, resulting in the difficulty with traditional
static or manual approaches of dependency evaluation.
To fill this gap, this paper proposes a stochastic approach
of dependency evaluation for IoT devices. A random walk
214 Chinese Journal of Electronics
model is built to describe the relationships of IoT devices,
and a Markov chain based approach is proposed for depen-
dency evaluation in real-world IoT environments. Traffic
measurement based schemes as well as algorithms for de-
riving the quantitative models are designed, and real-life
data based simulation experiments are conducted. This
work is expected to provide theoretical and technical ref-
erence to the design, development and management of the
IoT.
There are several avenues for future work. The ap-
proach presented in this paper could be implemented in
real large-scale IoT systems. The experimental results as
well as trace data in reality can provide us with a bet-
ter understanding of the behavior and characteristics of
IoT devices and related applications, which can help to
improve the design of the IoT software and services. An-
other goal of our future work is to further accelerate our
approach. Updating techniques for solving Markov model
can be applied, and our approach can be implemented
in a parallel way. The efficient evaluation would offer a
sustain of real-time decision making in high dynamic IoT
environment.
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HUANG Jiwei was born in 1987,
he received the Ph.D. and B.Eng. de-
grees both in computer science and technol-
ogy from Tsinghua University in 2014 and
2009, respectively. He is now an assistant
professor in the State Key Laboratory of
Networking and Switching Technology at
Beijing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications. He was a visiting scholar at
Georgia Institute of Technology. His re-
search interests include services computing, Internet of Things, and
performance evaluation. He has published more than 20 papers in
international journals and conference proceedings, e.g., IEEE Trans-
actions on Services Computing, ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE ICWS,
IEEE SCC, etc. (Email: huangjw@bupt.edu.cn)
CHEN Guo was born in 1991, he
received his B.Eng. degree in computer sci-
ence and technology from Beijing Univer-
sity of Posts and Telecommunications in
2013. He is now a graduate student in the
State Key Laboratory of Networking and
Switching Technology at Beijing University
of Posts and Telecommunications. His cur-
rent research interests include Internet of
Things, distributed system, operating sys-
tem and cloud computing, etc. (Email: guochen09@gmail.com)
CHENG Bo was born in 1975,
he received the Ph.D. degree in computer
science and engineering from University
of Electronic Science and Technology of
China in 2006. He is now a professor in
the State Key Laboratory of Networking
and Switching Technology at Beijing Uni-
versity of Posts and Telecommunications.
His current research interests include net-
work services and intelligence, Internet of
Things technology, communication software and distribute comput-
ing, etc. (Email: chengbo@bupt.edu.cn)