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Main Authors: Karanika, Anna, Wang, Kai-Siang, Liang, Han-Ting, Sundram, Shalni, Gupta, Indranil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13496
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author Karanika, Anna
Wang, Kai-Siang
Liang, Han-Ting
Sundram, Shalni
Gupta, Indranil
author_facet Karanika, Anna
Wang, Kai-Siang
Liang, Han-Ting
Sundram, Shalni
Gupta, Indranil
contents While RPCs form the bedrock of systems stacks, we posit that IoT device collections in smart spaces like homes, warehouses, and office buildings--which are all "user-facing"--require a more expressive abstraction. Orthogonal to prior work, which improved the reliability of IoT communication, our work focuses on improving the observability and programmability of IoT actions. We present the RASC (Request-Acknowledge-Start-Complete) abstraction, which provides acknowledgments at critical points after an IoT device action is initiated. RASC is a better fit for IoT actions, which naturally vary in length spatially (across devices) and temporally (across time, for a given device). RASC also enables the design of several new features: predicting action completion times accurately, detecting failures of actions faster, allowing fine-grained dependencies in programming, and scheduling. RASC is intended to be implemented atop today's available RPC mechanisms, rather than as a replacement. We integrated RASC into a popular and open-source IoT framework called Home Assistant. Our trace-driven evaluation finds that RASC meets latency SLOs, especially for long actions that last O(mins), which are common in smart spaces. Our scheduling policies for home automations (e.g., routines) outperform state-of-the-art counterparts by 10%-55%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_13496
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RASC: Enhancing Observability & Programmability in Smart Spaces
Karanika, Anna
Wang, Kai-Siang
Liang, Han-Ting
Sundram, Shalni
Gupta, Indranil
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
While RPCs form the bedrock of systems stacks, we posit that IoT device collections in smart spaces like homes, warehouses, and office buildings--which are all "user-facing"--require a more expressive abstraction. Orthogonal to prior work, which improved the reliability of IoT communication, our work focuses on improving the observability and programmability of IoT actions. We present the RASC (Request-Acknowledge-Start-Complete) abstraction, which provides acknowledgments at critical points after an IoT device action is initiated. RASC is a better fit for IoT actions, which naturally vary in length spatially (across devices) and temporally (across time, for a given device). RASC also enables the design of several new features: predicting action completion times accurately, detecting failures of actions faster, allowing fine-grained dependencies in programming, and scheduling. RASC is intended to be implemented atop today's available RPC mechanisms, rather than as a replacement. We integrated RASC into a popular and open-source IoT framework called Home Assistant. Our trace-driven evaluation finds that RASC meets latency SLOs, especially for long actions that last O(mins), which are common in smart spaces. Our scheduling policies for home automations (e.g., routines) outperform state-of-the-art counterparts by 10%-55%.
title RASC: Enhancing Observability & Programmability in Smart Spaces
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13496