  Enabling the Internet of things in remote areas without traditional
communication infrastructure requires a multi-layer network architecture. The
devices in the overlay network are required to provide coverage to the underlay
devices as well as to remain connected to other overlay devices. The
coordination, planning, and design of such two-layer heterogeneous networks is
an important problem to address. Moreover, the mobility of the nodes and their
vulnerability to adversaries pose new challenges to the connectivity. For
instance, the connectivity of devices can be affected by changes in the
network, e.g., the mobility of the underlay devices or the unavailability of
overlay devices due to failure or adversarial attacks. To this end, this work
proposes a feedback based adaptive, self-configurable, and resilient framework
for the overlay network that cognitively adapts to the changes in the network
to provide reliable connectivity between spatially dispersed smart devices. Our
results show that if sufficient overlay devices are available, the framework
leads to a connected configuration that ensures a high coverage of the mobile
underlay network. Moreover, the framework can actively reconfigure itself in
the event of varying levels of device failure.
