Improved Reliability of Communication in Cellular Internet of Things through Consensus

With the establishment and large-scale use of fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, it is foreseeable that the Cellular Internet of Things (CIoT) will be applied in various fields. For instance, there are a large number of sensors for temperature measurement and cameras for video capture in cities. To provide highly reliable CIoT services, a reliable communication network must be designed. One of the commonly used methods to design a reliable communication network in a distributed system is to reach a consensus. However, none of the protocols proposed for the consensus problem in the past can be directly used in the network topology of CIoT. We propose an optimal protocol, the reliable communication medium consensus (RCMC), to reach a consensus on CIoT. The maximum number of abnormal communication media (CMs) in the CIoT topology is tolerated by the proposed RCMC, and only two data exchanges need to be performed.