Meerkat: Scalable, Network-Aware Failure Recovery for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) demands real-time, low-latency processing of data generated by thousands of heterogeneous, resource-constrained devices. In such dynamic environments, ensuring fault tolerance becomes critical, especially for safety-sensitive applications like disaster management or patient monitoring. However, existing centralized fault tolerance solutions face serious scalability challenges across large, hierarchically connected IoT topologies. In this paper, we present Meerkat, a network-aware fault-tolerance protocol explicitly designed for IoT environments. Meerkat achieves zero-downtime recovery via redundant operator execution on disjoint paths and efficient duplicate detection. It also includes dynamic load balancing that adapts operator placement to device volatility, ensuring fair resource use. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, Meerkat sustains up to 70× higher throughput with only 28% network overhead. These results highlight Meerkat's ability to deliver efficient fault tolerance with minimal overhead at IoT scale.