TIP: A Decentralized Intent-Based Protocol for Declarative IoT Interoperability and Sandboxed Schema Adaptation
2026-05-25 • Networking and Internet Architecture
Networking and Internet ArchitectureCryptography and SecurityDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the problem of different IoT devices struggling to work together because they use various hardware, networks, and data formats. They introduce TIP, a new network protocol where devices express what they want to do rather than who to talk to, making communication more flexible. TIP finds suitable devices using a mix of local and global discovery methods and automatically fixes data format mismatches using secure, isolated code modules. Their tests show TIP works quickly and reliably in tough settings.
Internet of Things (IoT)MQTTCoAPDDSmDNSKademlia DHTWebAssembly (WASM)Ed25519X25519ChaCha20-Poly1305
Authors
Yeison David Mejia Mosquera
Abstract
Heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) systems suffer from fragmentation across hardware architectures, networking stacks, and data serialization formats. Existing standards (such as MQTT, COAP, and DDS) rely on address-bound, imperative routing models that require hardcoded configurations and leave no flexibility for runtime schema translation. This paper presents TIP (The Intent Protocol), a decentralized, declarative network protocol. Instead of addressing specific physical endpoints, nodes submit abstract intents specifying desired capabilities, schemas, and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The TIP Engine resolves matching nodes using a hybrid discovery mechanism combining local multicast DNS (mDNS) with Kademlia Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). Selection is optimized via a multi-criteria scoring algorithm incorporating network latency, historical reputation, and contract compliance. Mismatched data representations are reconciled on-the-fly inside isolated WebAssembly (WASM) sandboxes compiled dynamically from TOML specifications. Security is enforced through Ed25519 signatures, X25519 key exchanges, and ChaCha20-Poly 1305 payload encryption. Evaluation of our reference implementation in Rust and C++ shows sub-millisecond translation overhead and robust resilience under industrial conditions.