Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

Energy efficiency evaluation of BLE 5 technology

Abstract. As the demand for consumer electronic gadgets keep on growing rapidly day by day, a class of wirelessly connected digital accessories is getting to be built up. In this case, energy efficiency is considered as an essential basic necessity for a wireless communication system to be well adapted for the internet of things (IoT) application. The protocol parameters must be optimized for a given application in order to minimize power consumption. An energy model is therefore required, which can predict the energy consumption of a wireless device based on, Bluetooth low energy (BLE), e.g., for different parameter values. In this case, the BLE 5 technique can be a very effective solution. Lately, the Bluetooth 5 specifications have been introduced in order to offer remarkable improvements in comparison to the previous versions of the protocol. Bluetooth 5 coded is a new special kind of connection that comes with reliable communication features that varies in speed, range, and energy consumption aiming at providing better long-distance connections, but at a lower bit rate. Bluetooth 5 targets to improve twice the speed, four times range, and eight times the advertising in comparison to Bluetooth 4. This thesis describes the evaluation of the energy efficiency of recently specified BLE 5 technique’s coded mode. This work analyses both the analytical, and experimental performance of the energy efficiency of BLE 5 (S = 8) coded mode solution. It includes analytical modelling, Matlab programming, and real-life measurement using Nordic semiconductor nRF52840 development kit. The performance of lately revealed BLE 5 coded technique is compared to the performance of the BLE 4, which is seen today to be mostly used in case of commercial wireless devices. To improve the communication range of this low-power technique for IoT purposes, BLE 5 coded mode uses a forward error correction (FEC) method. Because of coding overhead, the packet length increases, and the throughput decreases. In this thesis, the frequency 2.4 GHz is considered. The LE Coded PHY is responsible for adding two steps into the packet transmissions, and reception. Firstly, FEC method is applied to the packet so that the receiver can make a correction of bit errors when the packet is received, and would be capable to improve the packet error rate (PER). Secondly, a pattern mapper method is applied to the packet. This FEC, and pattern mapping results in getting better sensitivity. The experimental results from this thesis show that BLE 5 technique provides better packet error rate (PER) performance, communication range performance, and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) performance than BLE 4, and BLE 5 consumes less energy than BLE 4, which was found out using analytical modelling

Lightweight Synchronization Algorithm with Self-Calibration for Industrial LORA Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor and actuator networks are gaining momentum in the era of Industrial Internet of Things IIoT. The usage of the close-loop data from sensors in the manufacturing chain is extending the common monitoring scenario of the Wireless Sensors Networks WSN where data were just logged. In this paper we present an accurate timing synchronization for TDMA implemented on the state of art IoT radio, such as LoRa, that is a good solution in industrial environments for its high robustness. Experimental results show how it is possible to modulate the drift correction and keep the synchronization error within the requirements

POWER-SUPPLaY: Leaking Data from Air-Gapped Systems by Turning the Power-Supplies Into Speakers

It is known that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers through their speakers via sonic and ultrasonic waves. To eliminate the threat of such acoustic covert channels in sensitive systems, audio hardware can be disabled and the use of loudspeakers can be strictly forbidden. Such audio-less systems are considered to be \textit{audio-gapped}, and hence immune to acoustic covert channels. In this paper, we introduce a technique that enable attackers leak data acoustically from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems. Our developed malware can exploit the computer power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as an out-of-band, secondary speaker with limited capabilities. The malicious code manipulates the internal \textit{switching frequency} of the power supply and hence controls the sound waveforms generated from its capacitors and transformers. Our technique enables producing audio tones in a frequency band of 0-24khz and playing audio streams (e.g., WAV) from a computer power supply without the need for audio hardware or speakers. Binary data (files, keylogging, encryption keys, etc.) can be modulated over the acoustic signals and sent to a nearby receiver (e.g., smartphone). We show that our technique works with various types of systems: PC workstations and servers, as well as embedded systems and IoT devices that have no audio hardware at all. We provide technical background and discuss implementation details such as signal generation and data modulation. We show that the POWER-SUPPLaY code can operate from an ordinary user-mode process and doesn't need any hardware access or special privileges. Our evaluation shows that using POWER-SUPPLaY, sensitive data can be exfiltrated from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems from a distance of five meters away at a maximal bit rates of 50 bit/sec

An antenna switching based NOMA scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 concurrent transmission

This paper introduces a Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scheme to support concurrent transmission of multiple IEEE 802.15.4 packets. Unlike collision avoidance Multiple Access Control (MAC), concurrent transmission supports Concurrent-MAC (C-MAC) where packet collision is allowed. The communication latency can be reduced by C-MAC because a user can transmit immediately without waiting for the completion of other users’ transmission. The big challenge of concurrent transmission is that error free demodulation of multiple collided packets hardly can be achieved due to severe Multiple Access Interference (MAI). To improve the demodulation performance with MAI presented, we introduce an architecture with multiple switching antennas sharing a single analog transceiver to capture spatial character of different users. Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) algorithm is designed to separate collided packets by utilizing the spatial character. Simulation shows that at least five users can transmit concurrently to the SIC receiver equipped with eight antennas without sacrificing Packet Error Rate