Catchme If You Can: Enable Sustainable Communications Using Internet Of Movable Things

the customary perspective of Internet of Things (IoT) endeavors to unite all the physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity to allow more direct integrations between the physical world and cyber-based systems. While these networked devices and associated communications can increase the energy demands exponentially and end up harming the environment seriously. Currently most researchers and practitioners have dedicated their efforts on improving the resource efficiency of IoT systems itself, while missing that there is a great potential to fully utilize the advanced capabilities of storage and communications in IoT devices, especially their movability which can carry the data to the destinations too. In this paper, we are paving a novel communications paradigm, named as Context-aware tethering communications hangout using Mobile encounter (CatchMe). A time-space matrix has been proposed to capture human mobility preferences, as well as a similarity analytical framework has been developed for mobile encountering analysis and predication, which are pillar stones of CatchMe paradigm. It aims to fully utilize the devices' mobility to create their encounter opportunities for short-range device to device (D2D) communications. Based on the real mobility traces, two case studies for mobility analysis have been conducted and the results confirm that there are reasonable opportunities existing for mobile encountering among most users, thus CatchMe is feasible. The extra numerical study demonstrates that CatchMe has great promises to significantly reduce the energy consumption, comparing with the infrastructure-based transmission approach which has been taken for granted in daily use. The current stage of proof-of-concept on CatchMe paradigm does not yet lend itself to sweeping prescription. Nevertheless, we believe this research direction is thought provoking and opening a new conversation for researchers to rethink and redesign more sustainable communications and networking by fully exploring the moveable IoTs.