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

Demo Abstract: EmuLink - Heterogeneous Sensor Network Simulation in Cooja

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Cross-level sensor network simulation with COOJA

Simulators for wireless sensor networks are a valuable tool for system development. However, current simulators can only simulate a single level of a system at once. This makes system development and evolution difficult since developers cannot use the same simulator for both high-level algorithm development and low-level development such as device-driver implementations. We propose cross-level simulation, a novel type of wireless sensor network simulation that enables holistic simultaneous simulation at different levels. We present an implementation of such a simulator, COOJA, a simulator for the Contiki sensor node operating system. COOJA allows for simultaneous simulation at the network level, the operating system level, and the machine code instruction set level. With COOJA, we show the feasibility of the cross-level simulation approach

Unified radio and network control across heterogeneous hardware platforms

Experimentation is an important step in the investigation of techniques for handling spectrum scarcity or the development of new waveforms in future wireless networks. However, it is impractical and not cost effective to construct custom platforms for each future network scenario to be investigated. This problem is addressed by defining Unified Programming Interfaces that allow common access to several platforms for experimentation-based prototyping, research, and development purposes. The design of these interfaces is driven by a diverse set of scenarios that capture the functionality relevant to future network implementations while trying to keep them as generic as possible. Herein, the definition of this set of scenarios is presented as well as the architecture for supporting experimentation-based wireless research over multiple hardware platforms. The proposed architecture for experimentation incorporates both local and global unified interfaces to control any aspect of a wireless system while being completely agnostic to the actual technology incorporated. Control is feasible from the low-level features of individual radios to the entire network stack, including hierarchical control combinations. A testbed to enable the use of the above architecture is utilized that uses a backbone network in order to be able to extract measurements and observe the overall behaviour of the system under test without imposing further communication overhead to the actual experiment. Based on the aforementioned architecture, a system is proposed that is able to support the advancement of intelligent techniques for future networks through experimentation while decoupling promising algorithms and techniques from the capabilities of a specific hardware platform

Modelling mobile health systems: an application of augmented MDA for the extended healthcare enterprise

Mobile health systems can extend the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider by bringing services to the patient any time and anywhere. We propose a model-driven design and development methodology for the development of the m-health components in such extended enterprise computing systems. The methodology applies a model-driven design and development approach augmented with formal validation and verification to address quality and correctness and to support model transformation. Recent work on modelling applications from the healthcare domain is reported. One objective of this work is to explore and elaborate the proposed methodology. At the University of Twente we are developing m-health systems based on Body Area Networks (BANs). One specialization of the generic BAN is the health BAN, which incorporates a set of devices and associated software components to provide some set of health-related services. A patient will have a personalized instance of the health BAN customized to their current set of needs. A health professional interacts with their\ud patients¿ BANs via a BAN Professional System. The set of deployed BANs are supported by a server. We refer to this distributed system as the BAN System. The BAN system extends the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider. Development of such systems requires a sound software engineering approach and this is what we explore with the new methodology. The methodology is illustrated with reference to recent modelling activities targeted at real implementations. In the context of the Awareness project BAN implementations will be trialled in a number of clinical settings including epilepsy management and management of chronic pain

Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook

In modern distributed computing, applications are rarely built directly atop operating system facilities, e.g., sockets. Higher-level middleware abstractions and systems are often employed to simplify the programmer’s chore or to achieve interoperability. In contrast, real-world wireless sensor network (WSN) applications are almost always developed by relying directly on the operating system. Why is this the case? Does it make sense to include a middleware layer in the design of WSNs? And, if so, is it the same kind of software system as in traditional distributed computing? What are the fundamental concepts, reasonable assumptions, and key criteria guiding its design? What are the main open research challenges, and the potential pitfalls? Most importantly, is it worth pursuing research in this field? This paper provides a (biased) answer to these and other research questions, preceded by a brief account on the state of the art in the field

Wireless and Physical Security via Embedded Sensor Networks

Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) monitor 802.11 wireless frames (Layer-2) in an attempt to detect misuse. What distinguishes a WIDS from a traditional Network IDS is the ability to utilize the broadcast nature of the medium to reconstruct the physical location of the offending party, as opposed to its possibly spoofed (MAC addresses) identity in cyber space. Traditional Wireless Network Security Systems are still heavily anchored in the digital plane of "cyber space" and hence cannot be used reliably or effectively to derive the physical identity of an intruder in order to prevent further malicious wireless broadcasts, for example by escorting an intruder off the premises based on physical evidence. In this paper, we argue that Embedded Sensor Networks could be used effectively to bridge the gap between digital and physical security planes, and thus could be leveraged to provide reciprocal benefit to surveillance and security tasks on both planes. Toward that end, we present our recent experience integrating wireless networking security services into the SNBENCH (Sensor Network workBench). The SNBENCH provides an extensible framework that enables the rapid development and automated deployment of Sensor Network applications on a shared, embedded sensing and actuation infrastructure. The SNBENCH's extensible architecture allows an engineer to quickly integrate new sensing and response capabilities into the SNBENCH framework, while high-level languages and compilers allow novice SN programmers to compose SN service logic, unaware of the lower-level implementation details of tools on which their services rely. In this paper we convey the simplicity of the service composition through concrete examples that illustrate the power and potential of Wireless Security Services that span both the physical and digital plane.National Science Foundation (CISE/CSR 0720604, ENG/EFRI 0735974, CIES/CNS 0520166, CNS/ITR 0205294, CISE/ERA RI 0202067