An Architecture for Spatial Networking
This addresses the need for efficient and secure networking in dense physical environments like smart cities or IoT deployments, representing a new paradigm rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of cloud-first architectures forcing all device communication through wide-area networks, which lacks an abstraction for spatial networking to enable private, robust, and low-latency communication based on physical proximity. It introduces Bifröst, a programming model using bigraphs to express containment and connectivity, enabling spatially-aware applications with direct co-located device communication and local control.
Physical spaces are increasingly dense with networked devices, promising seamless coordination and ambient intelligence. Yet today, cloud-first architectures force all communication through wide-area networks regardless of physical proximity. We lack an abstraction for spatial networking: using physical spaces to create boundaries for private, robust, and low-latency communication. We introduce $\textit{Bifröst}$, a programming model that realizes spatial networking using bigraphs to express both containment and connectivity, enabling policies to be scoped by physical boundaries, devices to be named by location, the instantiation of spatial services, and the composition of spaces while maintaining local autonomy. Bifröst enables a new class of spatially-aware applications, where co-located devices communicate directly, physical barriers require explicit gateways, and local control bridges to global coordination.