A smart device must be able to communicate with other smart devices within its vicinity. This communication should not depend on whether connectivity to the broader Internet is available. Exactly how well a device will function depends, in large part, on the device's purpose. Local operations, such as file transfer or remote login, between devices in a space should work. Remote operations, such as emailing the home office or resynchronizing with an office calendar program, may not work, or may require that a request be logged, to be fulfilled when Internet connectivity is available again.
Smart devices that communicate with each other without the need for external configuration are referred to as an ad-hoc network (AN). In order to enable ad-hoc networking of smart devices, the wireless channel that these devices share must support a discovery mode and must allow for arbitration of resources. Once the smart devices discover each other, they should be able to communicate without external support. At the same time, if one of the devices has Internet connectivity, Internet access should be available to the entire AN, without requiring the AN to reconfigure itself.
A major challenge is self-organization - enabling the smart devices to form a useful ad-hoc network quickly. It should take very little human input and allow the configuration effort to scale as the number of devices or spaces or both grow large. The mechanisms to create the ad-hoc environment should also be parsimonious in their use of bandwidth. We want to use most of the network's bandwidth to do work, not manage the network.