KRATOS: An Open Source Hardware-Software Platform for Rapid Research in LPWANs

Long-range (LoRa) radio technologies have recently gained momentum in the IoT landscape, allowing low-power communications over distances up to several kilometers. As a result, more and more LoRa networks are being deployed. However, commercially available LoRa devices are expensive and propriety, creating a barrier to entry and possibly slowing down developments and deployments of novel applications. Using open-source hardware and software platforms would allow more developers to test and build intelligent devices resulting in a better overall development ecosystem, lower barriers to entry, and rapid growth in the number of IoT applications. Toward this goal, this paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of KRATOS, a low-cost LoRa platform running ContikiOS. Both, our hardware and software designs are released as an open- source to the research community.Comment: Accepted at WiMob 201

IoT protocols, architectures, and applications

The proliferation of embedded systems, wireless technologies, and Internet protocols have made it possible for the Internet-of-things (IoT) to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual world and thereby enabling monitoring and control of the physical environment by data processing systems. IoT refers to the inter-networking of everyday objects that are equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities. These networks can collaborate to autonomously solve a variety of tasks. Due to the very diverse set of applications and application requirements, there is no single communication technology that is able to provide cost-effective and close to optimal performance in all scenarios. In this chapter, we report on research carried out on a selected number of IoT topics: low-power wide-area networks, in particular, LoRa and narrow-band IoT (NB-IoT); IP version 6 over IEEE 802.15.4 time-slotted channel hopping (6TiSCH); vehicular antenna design, integration, and processing; security aspects for vehicular networks; energy efficiency and harvesting for IoT systems; and software-defined networking/network functions virtualization for (SDN/NFV) IoT

A Multi-Hop 6LoWPAN Wireless Sensor Network for Waste Management Optimization

In the first part of this Thesis several Wireless Sensor Network technologies, including the ones based on the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol Standard like ZigBee, 6LoWPAN and Ultra Wide Band, as well as other technologies based on other protocol standards like Z-Wave, Bluetooth and Dash7, are analyzed with respect to relevance and suitability with the Waste Management Outsmart European FP7 Project. A particular attention is given to the parameters which characterize a Large Scale WSN for Smart Cities, due to the amount of sensors involved and to the practical application requested by the project. Secondly, a prototype of sensor network is proposed: an Operative System named Contiki is chosen for its portability on different hardware platforms, its Open Source license, for the use of the 6LoW-PAN protocol and for the implementation of the new RPL routing protocol. The Operative System is described in detail, with a special focus on the uIPv6 TCP/IP stack and RPL implementation. With regard to this innovative routing proto col designed specifically for Low Power Lossy Networks, chapter 4 describes in detail how the network topology is organized as a Directed Acyclic Graph, what is an RPL Instance and how downward and upward routes are constructed and maintained. With the use of several AVR Atmel modules mounting the Contiki OS a real WSN is created and, with an Ultrasonic Sensor, the filling level of a waste basket prototype is periodically detected and transmitted through a multi-hop wireless network to a sink nodeope

A Novel Architectural Framework on IoT Ecosystem, Security Aspects and Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Survey

For the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology continues to not only gain popularity and importance, but also witnesses the true realization of everything being smart. With the advent of the concept of smart everything, IoT has emerged as an area of great potential and incredible growth. An IoT ecosystem centers around innovation perspective which is considered as its fundamental core. Accordingly, IoT enabling technologies such as hardware and software platforms as well as standards become the core of the IoT ecosystem. However, any large-scale technological integration such as the IoT development poses the challenge to ensure secure data transmission. Perhaps, the ubiquitous and the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and the sensitive and private data being generated by IoT systems make them highly vulnerable to physical and cyber threats. In this paper, we re-define an IoT ecosystem from the core technologies view point. We propose a modified three layer IoT architecture by dividing the perception layer into elementary blocks based on their attributed functions. Enabling technologies, attacks and security countermeasures are classified under each layer of the proposed architecture. Additionally, to give the readers a broader perspective of the research area, we discuss the role of various state-of-the-art emerging technologies in the IoT security. We present the security aspects of the most prominent standards and other recently developed technologies for IoT which might have the potential to form the yet undefined IoT architecture. Among the technologies presented in this article, we give a special interest to one recent technology in IoT domain. This technology is named IQRF that stands for Intelligent Connectivity using Radio Frequency. It is an emerging technology for wireless packet-oriented communication that operates in sub-GHz ISM band (868 MHz) and which is intended for general use where wireless connectivity is needed, either in a mesh network or point-to-point (P2P) configuration. We also highlighted the security aspects implemented in this technology and we compare it with the other already known technologies. Moreover, a detailed discussion on the possible attacks is presented. These attacks are projected on the IoT technologies presented in this article including IQRF. In addition, lightweight security solutions, implemented in these technologies, to counter these threats in the proposed IoT ecosystem architecture are also presented. Lastly, we summarize the survey by listing out some common challenges and the future research directions in this field.publishedVersio

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Routing and Mobility on IPv6 over LoWPAN

The IoT means a world-wide network of interconnected objects based on standard communication protocols. An object in this context is a quotidian physical device augmented with sensing/actuating, processing, storing and communication capabilities. These objects must be able to interact with the surrounding environment where they are placed and to cooperate with neighbouring objects in order to accomplish a common objective. The IoT objects have also the capabilities of converting the sensed data into automated instructions and communicating them to other objects through the communication networks, avoiding the human intervention in several tasks. Most of IoT deployments are based on small devices with restricted computational resources and energy constraints. For this reason, initially the scientific community did not consider the use of IP protocol suite in this scenarios because there was the perception that it was too heavy to the available resources on such devices. Meanwhile, the scientific community and the industry started to rethink about the use of IP protocol suite in all IoT devices and now it is considered as the solution to provide connectivity between the IoT devices, independently of the Layer 2 protocol in use, and to connect them to the Internet. Despite the use of IP suite protocol in all devices and the amount of solutions proposed, many open issues remain unsolved in order to reach a seamless integration between the IoT and the Internet and to provide the conditions to IoT service widespread. This thesis addressed the challenges associated with the interconnectivity between the Internet and the IoT devices and with the security aspects of the IoT. In the interconnectivity between the IoT devices and the Internet the problem is how to provide valuable information to the Internet connected devices, independently of the supported IP protocol version, without being necessary accessed directly to the IoT nodes. In order to solve this problem, solutions based on Representational state transfer (REST) web services and IPv4 to IPv6 dual stack transition mechanism were proposed and evaluated. The REST web service and the transition mechanism runs only at the border router without penalizing the IoT constrained devices. The mitigation of the effects of internal and external security attacks minimizing the overhead imposed on the IoT devices is the security challenge addressed in this thesis. Three different solutions were proposed. The first is a mechanism to prevent remotely initiated transport level Denial of Service attacks that avoids the use of inefficient and hard to manage traditional firewalls. It is based on filtering at the border router the traffic received from the Internet and destined to the IoT network according to the conditions announced by each IoT device. The second is a network access security framework that can be used to control the nodes that have access to the network, based on administrative approval, and to enforce security compliance to the authorized nodes. The third is a network admission control framework that prevents IoT unauthorized nodes to communicate with IoT authorized nodes or with the Internet, which drastically reduces the number of possible security attacks. The network admission control was also exploited as a management mechanism as it can be used to manage the network size in terms of number of nodes, making the network more manageable, increasing its reliability and extending its lifetime.A IoT (Internet of Things) tem suscitado o interesse tanto da comunidade académica como da indústria, uma vez que os campos de aplicação são inúmeros assim como os potenciais ganhos que podem ser obtidos através do uso deste tipo de tecnologia. A IoT significa uma rede global de objetos ligados entre si através de uma rede de comunicações baseada em protocolos standard. Neste contexto, um objeto é um objeto físico do dia a dia ao qual foi adicionada a capacidade de medir e de atuar sobre variáveis físicas, de processar e armazenar dados e de comunicar. Estes objetos têm a capacidade de interagir com o meio ambiente envolvente e de cooperar com outros objetos vizinhos de forma a atingirem um objetivo comum. Estes objetos também têm a capacidade de converter os dados lidos em instruções e de as comunicar a outros objetos através da rede de comunicações, evitando desta forma a intervenção humana em diversas tarefas. A maior parte das concretizações de sistemas IoT são baseados em pequenos dispositivos autónomos com restrições ao nível dos recursos computacionais e de retenção de energia. Por esta razão, inicialmente a comunidade científica não considerou adequado o uso da pilha protocolar IP neste tipo de dispositivos, uma vez que havia a perceção de que era muito pesada para os recursos computacionais disponíveis. Entretanto, a comunidade científica e a indústria retomaram a discussão acerca dos benefícios do uso da pilha protocolar em todos os dispositivos da IoT e atualmente é considerada a solução para estabelecer a conetividade entre os dispositivos IoT independentemente do protocolo da camada dois em uso e para os ligar à Internet. Apesar do uso da pilha protocolar IP em todos os dispositivos e da quantidade de soluções propostas, são vários os problemas por resolver no que concerne à integração contínua e sem interrupções da IoT na Internet e de criar as condições para a adoção generalizada deste tipo de tecnologias. Esta tese versa sobre os desafios associados à integração da IoT na Internet e dos aspetos de segurança da IoT. Relativamente à integração da IoT na Internet o problema é como fornecer informação válida aos dispositivos ligados à Internet, independentemente da versão do protocolo IP em uso, evitando o acesso direto aos dispositivos IoT. Para a resolução deste problema foram propostas e avaliadas soluções baseadas em web services REST e em mecanismos de transição IPv4 para IPv6 do tipo pilha dupla (dual stack). O web service e o mecanismo de transição são suportados apenas no router de fronteira, sem penalizar os dispositivos IoT. No que concerne à segurança, o problema é mitigar os efeitos dos ataques de segurança internos e externos iniciados local e remotamente. Foram propostas três soluções diferentes, a primeira é um mecanismo que minimiza os efeitos dos ataques de negação de serviço com origem na Internet e que evita o uso de mecanismos de firewalls ineficientes e de gestão complexa. Este mecanismo filtra no router de fronteira o tráfego com origem na Internet é destinado à IoT de acordo com as condições anunciadas por cada um dos dispositivos IoT da rede. A segunda solução, é uma framework de network admission control que controla quais os dispositivos que podem aceder à rede com base na autorização administrativa e que aplica políticas de conformidade relativas à segurança aos dispositivos autorizados. A terceira é um mecanismo de network admission control para redes 6LoWPAN que evita que dispositivos não autorizados comuniquem com outros dispositivos legítimos e com a Internet o que reduz drasticamente o número de ataques à segurança. Este mecanismo também foi explorado como um mecanismo de gestão uma vez que pode ser utilizado a dimensão da rede quanto ao número de dispositivos, tornando-a mais fácil de gerir e aumentando a sua fiabilidade e o seu tempo de vida