Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings

Quasi-omniscient networks: scenarios on context capturing and new services through wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses future scenarios for the telecommunications field, addressing the impact of three important research trends in computer networks: Context, Sensors and Wireless Networks. The proposed scenarios clearly highlight the possible synergies between the defined areas, and describe the role of Users and Network Operators in order to achieve the described goals. The potential danger of an over-encompassing network is identified, with a brief discussion on the challenges associated to the implementation of such a knowledge-aware communications network. The paper finalizes presenting a classification on the typical scenarios to be expected, and highlighting the associated challenges. It also presents a proposal on a scalable network infrastructure for Context processing

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

The Deployment in the Wireless Sensor Networks: Methodologies, Recent Works and Applications

International audienceThe wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a research area in continuous evolution with a variety of application contexts. Wireless sensor networks pose many optimization problems, particularly because sensors have limited capacity in terms of energy, processing and memory. The deployment of sensor nodes is a critical phase that significantly affects the functioning and performance of the network. Often, the sensors constituting the network cannot be accurately positioned, and are scattered erratically. To compensate the randomness character of their placement, a large number of sensors is typically deployed, which also helps to increase the fault tolerance of the network. In this paper, we are interested in studying the positioning and placement of sensor nodes in a WSN. First, we introduce the problem of deployment and then we present the latest research works about the different proposed methods to solve this problem. Finally, we mention some similar issues related to the deployment and some of its interesting applications