Distributed communication and coordination for smart cyber-physical devices

Advanced building materials are nowadays an active research domain. New intelligent tile that combines traditional tiles with state-of-the-art large area electronic circuits, LED based lighting, embedded sensory and communication capabilities are begin built. Once installed, a cover made by these tiles forms a cyber-physical network of adjacent components where each tile can communicate with adjacent tiles to spread control commands and to collect sensory information by means of a multi-hop message routing. This thesis describes goals and technical solutions adopted for the development of the multi-hop communication and coordination protocol (T-Hop) that enables the desired features of a cover made by luminous tiles. Notable features include: flexibility in the installation, allowing arbitrary cover shapes, allowing arbitrary tiles orientation, smart self-configuration capabilities and fault-tolerance. Notable functions include: display an image on a cover and read data from the sensors equipping the tiles. After this description, the performances of the protocol are evaluated in terms of latencies of the core operations and, in the end, the tools that have been developed to test the protocol functioning are presented with the obtained results.