Situational awareness through IoT sensors : A smart healthcare system as a use case

Emerging technologies of the Internet of Things are getting increasingly significant and to some extent essential as well to the society we are living in. These technologies have shown ability over the time to be implemented in a number of different fields, for instance, Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart City, Smart Retail, Smart Supply Chain, Smart Farming, Smart Grid, Industrial Internet and many more. Incorporation of Internet of Things technologies in the healthcare sector has potential to benefit not only medical related enterprises but at the same time it can improve the overall health and well-being of individuals as well. The deployment of IoT integrated systems has to deal with fairly heterogeneous environments that consist of a large number of sensors and actuators which all can be quite different from one another in many aspects. For example, they can use different operating systems and can have different hardware architecture. Such sensors are sometimes used for situational awareness of the surrounding and for making the individuals interact better with their environment. Such variety of applications and tasks poses a problem for system designers and developers on the choice of the most suitable technology to be employed to accomplish a specific task. This thesis explores the potential of Internet of Things technologies in the medical sector. We used analytical hierarchical process to have a kind of situational awareness through IoT technologies. As an use case, a healthcare system was considered for elderly people with neurological problems who need special care – people suffering with dementia for example. At the same time we have taken into account for the proposed system that it would enable regular people track and monitor their usual activities with a focus on improving the quality of life and enhancing their overall wellbeing. It is of prime importance for the system designers and developers that they have an idea about the potential IoT technologies and applications that can help this cause. We have considered eleven different IoT technologies to select from for the proposed paradigm. The decision of selecting the most appropriate technology obviously depends upon different criteria. Every IoT technology has its pros and cons. According to the needs of the proposed healthcare system, we have constructed a multi-criteria hierarchical model to assess the potential of those eleven IoT technologies for the healthcare system and chosen the best one based on set criteria and sub criteria. A 4-tier Analytical Hierarchical model is used to compare those technologies in terms of their quality of service or effectiveness, their acceptability and from the cost perspective. These criteria are then further divided into sub-criteria and the technologies are compared with respect to these ten sub-criteria to have a more thorough and comprehensive analysis. For these comparisons, quantitative data were collected from the internet including IEEE articles, and some of the comparisons are purely subjective. The results indicate that wide-area low-power solutions show more potential for the proposed healthcare system than other IoT technologies which we used for comparison, and SigFox tops the table. Also WiFi solutions have shown significant potential. But again, every technology has its shortcomings as well. Further studies are needed to see if we can somehow make a hybrid healthcare system that utilizes multiple IoT technologies and incorporate the plus points of all of them into the system; such future system can prove to be revolutionary in the medical care

Contribution to the publish/subscribe communication model for the development of ubiquitous services in wireless sensor networks

Advances in wireless technologies and the rapid development of integrated electronics have made wireless sensor networks (WSN) one of the key technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Thanks to the ability of these networks to measure the physical phenomena of their environment, process and communicate this information using wireless technologies, they have excelled in the development of applications that respond or adapt to the context of a user, as is the case of ubiquitous environments such as smart cities, industrial automation, e-health among others. In addition, the IoT has opened the possibility that intelligent objects or devices are also capable of exchanging status information, conditions and capacity in order to interact with each other, in the same way that human beings have done through systems based on presence. These systems require information of an event in real time to react in a timely manner to the conditions or context of the user or device. These applications open new challenges in the management of WSN resources, since these networks operate in environments that are generally prone to packet loss and consist of generally small nodes with limited resources in memory, processing, bandwidth and power. The main objective of this thesis is the development of several mechanisms that allow the adaptation of the Publish/Subscribe protocols to the characteristics and limitations of the WSN for the provision of ubiquitous services in the context of the IoT. In addition, QoS support is supplied through mechanisms that provide reliability and timeliness in the delivery of packets and data aggregation techniques are applied to be efficient in the power consumption and the WSN bandwidth. Our research proposes an architecture to provide a presence service for WSN based on a Publish/ Subscribe model distributed and focused on mechanisms such as the aggregation of data and the publication of messages on demand to achieve energy efficiency and bandwidth. All these mechanisms have been applied in the design of a system called PASH aimed at home control based on the concept of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The reliability provided by Publish/Subscribe protocols in WSN is of great importance in the design of applications that require receiving a message to react on time or in real time to an event. Initially, we focused our study on increasing the proportion of packet delivery (PDR) in the destination node through the improvement of reliability mechanisms. We evaluated the reliability mechanism of the MQTT-SN protocol and several proposed mechanisms of the CoAP protocol. From this evaluation, we propose a new and simple adaptive retransmission mechanism to respond to packet loss in the most appropriate way. Finally, we consider that applications such as: e-health, critical infrastructure control and monitoring, among others, must meet different QoS requirements, such as reliability and timeliness for each type of message received. In addition, data aggregation techniques play an important role in WSN to reduce power consumption and bandwidth. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism that provides the application with three different levels of QoS: we provide an improvement of our previous relay mechanism for reliability, we include the data aggregation in our reliability mechanism and we provide a timeliness mechanism in the delivery of packets.Els avenços en les tecnologies sense fils i al ràpid desenvolupament de l'electrònica integrada, ha convertit les xarxes de sensors sense fils (WSN) en una de les tecnologies claus de l'Internet de les Coses (Iot). Gràcies a la capacitat que tenen aquestes xarxes de mesurar els fenòmens físics del seu entorn, processar i comunicar aquesta informació utilitzant tecnologies sense fils, s'han destacat en el desenvolupament d'aplicacions que responguin o s'adaptin al context d'un usuari, com és el cas dels entorns ubics com a ciutats intel·ligents, automatització industrial, salut electrònica entre d'altres. A més, el IOT ha obert la possibilitat que els objectes o dispositius intel·ligents també siguin capaços d'intercanviar informació d'estat, condicions i capacitat per tal d'interactuar entre si, de la mateixa manera que els éssers humans ho han fet a través de sistemes basats en presència. Aquests sistemes requereixen informació d'un esdeveniment en temps real per reaccionar de manera oportuna a les condicions o al context de l'usuari o dispositiu. Aquestes aplicacions obren nous desafiaments en l'administració dels recursos de WSN, ja que aquestes xarxes operen en entorns que generalment són propensos a la pèrdua de paquets i consten de nodes generalment petits amb recursos limitats en memòria, processament, ample de banda i alimentació. El principal objectiu d'aquesta tesi és el desenvolupament de diversos mecanismes que permetin l'adequació dels protocols d'Publish / Subscribe a les característiques i limitacions de la WSN per a la provisió de serveis ubics en el context de la IOT. A més, es brinda suport de QoS a través de mecanismes que proporcionen fiabilitat i puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets i s'apliquen tècniques d'agregació de dades per a ser eficients en el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda de la WSN. La nostra investigació proposa una arquitectura per a proporcionar un servei de presència per WSN basat en un model de Publish / Subscribe distribuït i centrat en mecanismes com ara l'agregació de dades i la publicació de missatges en demanda per aconseguir eficiència en l'energia i l'ample de banda . Tots aquests mecanismes han estat aplicats en el disseny d'un sistema anomenat Pash dirigit al control de la llar basat en el concepte de Vida Assistida (AAL). La fiabilitat proporcionada pels protocols de Publish / Subscribe WSN és de gran importància en el disseny d'aplicacions que requereixen rebre un missatge per reaccionar a temps o en temps real davant un esdeveniment. Inicialment enfoquem el nostre estudi en augmentar la proporció de lliurament de paquets (PDR) en el node de destinació a través de la millora dels mecanismes de fiabilitat. Avaluem el mecanisme de fiabilitat del protocol MQTT-SN i diversos mecanismes proposats del protocol COAP. A partir d'aquesta avaluació, proposem un nou i senzill mecanisme de retransmissió adaptable per respondre a la pèrdua de paquets de la manera més adequada. Finalment, considerem que les aplicacions com: salut electrònica, control d'infraestructura crítica i monitoratge, entre d'altres, han de complir diferents requisits de QoS, com la fiabilitat i la puntualitat per a cada tipus de missatge rebut. A més, les tècniques d'agregació de dades tenen un paper important en WSN per reduir el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda. En aquesta tesi, proposem un mecanisme que proporciona a la aplicació tres nivells de QoS diferents: proporcionem una millora del nostre mecanisme de retransmissió anterior per a la fiabilitat, incloem l'agregació de dades en el nostre mecanisme de fiabilitat i proporcionem un mecanisme de puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets.Postprint (published version

Contribution to the publish/subscribe communication model for the development of ubiquitous services in wireless sensor networks

Advances in wireless technologies and the rapid development of integrated electronics have made wireless sensor networks (WSN) one of the key technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Thanks to the ability of these networks to measure the physical phenomena of their environment, process and communicate this information using wireless technologies, they have excelled in the development of applications that respond or adapt to the context of a user, as is the case of ubiquitous environments such as smart cities, industrial automation, e-health among others. In addition, the IoT has opened the possibility that intelligent objects or devices are also capable of exchanging status information, conditions and capacity in order to interact with each other, in the same way that human beings have done through systems based on presence. These systems require information of an event in real time to react in a timely manner to the conditions or context of the user or device. These applications open new challenges in the management of WSN resources, since these networks operate in environments that are generally prone to packet loss and consist of generally small nodes with limited resources in memory, processing, bandwidth and power. The main objective of this thesis is the development of several mechanisms that allow the adaptation of the Publish/Subscribe protocols to the characteristics and limitations of the WSN for the provision of ubiquitous services in the context of the IoT. In addition, QoS support is supplied through mechanisms that provide reliability and timeliness in the delivery of packets and data aggregation techniques are applied to be efficient in the power consumption and the WSN bandwidth. Our research proposes an architecture to provide a presence service for WSN based on a Publish/ Subscribe model distributed and focused on mechanisms such as the aggregation of data and the publication of messages on demand to achieve energy efficiency and bandwidth. All these mechanisms have been applied in the design of a system called PASH aimed at home control based on the concept of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The reliability provided by Publish/Subscribe protocols in WSN is of great importance in the design of applications that require receiving a message to react on time or in real time to an event. Initially, we focused our study on increasing the proportion of packet delivery (PDR) in the destination node through the improvement of reliability mechanisms. We evaluated the reliability mechanism of the MQTT-SN protocol and several proposed mechanisms of the CoAP protocol. From this evaluation, we propose a new and simple adaptive retransmission mechanism to respond to packet loss in the most appropriate way. Finally, we consider that applications such as: e-health, critical infrastructure control and monitoring, among others, must meet different QoS requirements, such as reliability and timeliness for each type of message received. In addition, data aggregation techniques play an important role in WSN to reduce power consumption and bandwidth. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism that provides the application with three different levels of QoS: we provide an improvement of our previous relay mechanism for reliability, we include the data aggregation in our reliability mechanism and we provide a timeliness mechanism in the delivery of packets.Els avenços en les tecnologies sense fils i al ràpid desenvolupament de l'electrònica integrada, ha convertit les xarxes de sensors sense fils (WSN) en una de les tecnologies claus de l'Internet de les Coses (Iot). Gràcies a la capacitat que tenen aquestes xarxes de mesurar els fenòmens físics del seu entorn, processar i comunicar aquesta informació utilitzant tecnologies sense fils, s'han destacat en el desenvolupament d'aplicacions que responguin o s'adaptin al context d'un usuari, com és el cas dels entorns ubics com a ciutats intel·ligents, automatització industrial, salut electrònica entre d'altres. A més, el IOT ha obert la possibilitat que els objectes o dispositius intel·ligents també siguin capaços d'intercanviar informació d'estat, condicions i capacitat per tal d'interactuar entre si, de la mateixa manera que els éssers humans ho han fet a través de sistemes basats en presència. Aquests sistemes requereixen informació d'un esdeveniment en temps real per reaccionar de manera oportuna a les condicions o al context de l'usuari o dispositiu. Aquestes aplicacions obren nous desafiaments en l'administració dels recursos de WSN, ja que aquestes xarxes operen en entorns que generalment són propensos a la pèrdua de paquets i consten de nodes generalment petits amb recursos limitats en memòria, processament, ample de banda i alimentació. El principal objectiu d'aquesta tesi és el desenvolupament de diversos mecanismes que permetin l'adequació dels protocols d'Publish / Subscribe a les característiques i limitacions de la WSN per a la provisió de serveis ubics en el context de la IOT. A més, es brinda suport de QoS a través de mecanismes que proporcionen fiabilitat i puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets i s'apliquen tècniques d'agregació de dades per a ser eficients en el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda de la WSN. La nostra investigació proposa una arquitectura per a proporcionar un servei de presència per WSN basat en un model de Publish / Subscribe distribuït i centrat en mecanismes com ara l'agregació de dades i la publicació de missatges en demanda per aconseguir eficiència en l'energia i l'ample de banda . Tots aquests mecanismes han estat aplicats en el disseny d'un sistema anomenat Pash dirigit al control de la llar basat en el concepte de Vida Assistida (AAL). La fiabilitat proporcionada pels protocols de Publish / Subscribe WSN és de gran importància en el disseny d'aplicacions que requereixen rebre un missatge per reaccionar a temps o en temps real davant un esdeveniment. Inicialment enfoquem el nostre estudi en augmentar la proporció de lliurament de paquets (PDR) en el node de destinació a través de la millora dels mecanismes de fiabilitat. Avaluem el mecanisme de fiabilitat del protocol MQTT-SN i diversos mecanismes proposats del protocol COAP. A partir d'aquesta avaluació, proposem un nou i senzill mecanisme de retransmissió adaptable per respondre a la pèrdua de paquets de la manera més adequada. Finalment, considerem que les aplicacions com: salut electrònica, control d'infraestructura crítica i monitoratge, entre d'altres, han de complir diferents requisits de QoS, com la fiabilitat i la puntualitat per a cada tipus de missatge rebut. A més, les tècniques d'agregació de dades tenen un paper important en WSN per reduir el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda. En aquesta tesi, proposem un mecanisme que proporciona a la aplicació tres nivells de QoS diferents: proporcionem una millora del nostre mecanisme de retransmissió anterior per a la fiabilitat, incloem l'agregació de dades en el nostre mecanisme de fiabilitat i proporcionem un mecanisme de puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets.Postprint (published version

Congestion Control Algorithms for the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of physical devices, such as temperature sensors and lights, that are connected to the Internet. The devices are typically battery powered and are constrained by their low processing power, memory and low bitrate wireless communication links. The vast amount of IoT devices can cause heavy congestion in the Internet if congestion is not properly addressed. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is an HTTP-like protocol for constrained devices built on top of UDP. CoAP includes a simple congestion control algorithm (DefaultCoAP). CoAP Simple Congestion Control/Advanced (CoCoA) is a more sophisticated alternative for DefaultCoAP. CoAP can also be run over TCP with TCP's congestion control mechanisms. The focus of this thesis is to study CoAP's congestion control. Shortcomings of DefaultCoAP and CoCoA are identified using empirical performance evaluations conducted in an emulated IoT environment. In a scenario with hundreds of clients and a large buffer in the bottleneck router, DefaultCoAP does not adapt to the long queuing delay. In a similar scenario where short-lived clients exchange only a small amount of messages, CoCoA clients are unable to sample a round-trip delay time. Both of these situations are severe enough to cause a congestion collapse, where most of the link bandwidth is wasted on unnecessary retransmissions. A new retransmission timeout and congestion control algorithm called Fast-Slow Retransmission Timeout (FASOR) is congestion safe in these two scenarios and is even able to outperform CoAP over TCP. FASOR with accurate round-trip delay samples is able to outperform basic FASOR in the challenging and realistic scenario with short-lived clients and an error-prone link

Contribution to the publish/subscribe communication model for the development of ubiquitous services in wireless sensor networks

Advances in wireless technologies and the rapid development of integrated electronics have made wireless sensor networks (WSN) one of the key technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Thanks to the ability of these networks to measure the physical phenomena of their environment, process and communicate this information using wireless technologies, they have excelled in the development of applications that respond or adapt to the context of a user, as is the case of ubiquitous environments such as smart cities, industrial automation, e-health among others. In addition, the IoT has opened the possibility that intelligent objects or devices are also capable of exchanging status information, conditions and capacity in order to interact with each other, in the same way that human beings have done through systems based on presence. These systems require information of an event in real time to react in a timely manner to the conditions or context of the user or device. These applications open new challenges in the management of WSN resources, since these networks operate in environments that are generally prone to packet loss and consist of generally small nodes with limited resources in memory, processing, bandwidth and power. The main objective of this thesis is the development of several mechanisms that allow the adaptation of the Publish/Subscribe protocols to the characteristics and limitations of the WSN for the provision of ubiquitous services in the context of the IoT. In addition, QoS support is supplied through mechanisms that provide reliability and timeliness in the delivery of packets and data aggregation techniques are applied to be efficient in the power consumption and the WSN bandwidth. Our research proposes an architecture to provide a presence service for WSN based on a Publish/ Subscribe model distributed and focused on mechanisms such as the aggregation of data and the publication of messages on demand to achieve energy efficiency and bandwidth. All these mechanisms have been applied in the design of a system called PASH aimed at home control based on the concept of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The reliability provided by Publish/Subscribe protocols in WSN is of great importance in the design of applications that require receiving a message to react on time or in real time to an event. Initially, we focused our study on increasing the proportion of packet delivery (PDR) in the destination node through the improvement of reliability mechanisms. We evaluated the reliability mechanism of the MQTT-SN protocol and several proposed mechanisms of the CoAP protocol. From this evaluation, we propose a new and simple adaptive retransmission mechanism to respond to packet loss in the most appropriate way. Finally, we consider that applications such as: e-health, critical infrastructure control and monitoring, among others, must meet different QoS requirements, such as reliability and timeliness for each type of message received. In addition, data aggregation techniques play an important role in WSN to reduce power consumption and bandwidth. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism that provides the application with three different levels of QoS: we provide an improvement of our previous relay mechanism for reliability, we include the data aggregation in our reliability mechanism and we provide a timeliness mechanism in the delivery of packets.Els avenços en les tecnologies sense fils i al ràpid desenvolupament de l'electrònica integrada, ha convertit les xarxes de sensors sense fils (WSN) en una de les tecnologies claus de l'Internet de les Coses (Iot). Gràcies a la capacitat que tenen aquestes xarxes de mesurar els fenòmens físics del seu entorn, processar i comunicar aquesta informació utilitzant tecnologies sense fils, s'han destacat en el desenvolupament d'aplicacions que responguin o s'adaptin al context d'un usuari, com és el cas dels entorns ubics com a ciutats intel·ligents, automatització industrial, salut electrònica entre d'altres. A més, el IOT ha obert la possibilitat que els objectes o dispositius intel·ligents també siguin capaços d'intercanviar informació d'estat, condicions i capacitat per tal d'interactuar entre si, de la mateixa manera que els éssers humans ho han fet a través de sistemes basats en presència. Aquests sistemes requereixen informació d'un esdeveniment en temps real per reaccionar de manera oportuna a les condicions o al context de l'usuari o dispositiu. Aquestes aplicacions obren nous desafiaments en l'administració dels recursos de WSN, ja que aquestes xarxes operen en entorns que generalment són propensos a la pèrdua de paquets i consten de nodes generalment petits amb recursos limitats en memòria, processament, ample de banda i alimentació. El principal objectiu d'aquesta tesi és el desenvolupament de diversos mecanismes que permetin l'adequació dels protocols d'Publish / Subscribe a les característiques i limitacions de la WSN per a la provisió de serveis ubics en el context de la IOT. A més, es brinda suport de QoS a través de mecanismes que proporcionen fiabilitat i puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets i s'apliquen tècniques d'agregació de dades per a ser eficients en el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda de la WSN. La nostra investigació proposa una arquitectura per a proporcionar un servei de presència per WSN basat en un model de Publish / Subscribe distribuït i centrat en mecanismes com ara l'agregació de dades i la publicació de missatges en demanda per aconseguir eficiència en l'energia i l'ample de banda . Tots aquests mecanismes han estat aplicats en el disseny d'un sistema anomenat Pash dirigit al control de la llar basat en el concepte de Vida Assistida (AAL). La fiabilitat proporcionada pels protocols de Publish / Subscribe WSN és de gran importància en el disseny d'aplicacions que requereixen rebre un missatge per reaccionar a temps o en temps real davant un esdeveniment. Inicialment enfoquem el nostre estudi en augmentar la proporció de lliurament de paquets (PDR) en el node de destinació a través de la millora dels mecanismes de fiabilitat. Avaluem el mecanisme de fiabilitat del protocol MQTT-SN i diversos mecanismes proposats del protocol COAP. A partir d'aquesta avaluació, proposem un nou i senzill mecanisme de retransmissió adaptable per respondre a la pèrdua de paquets de la manera més adequada. Finalment, considerem que les aplicacions com: salut electrònica, control d'infraestructura crítica i monitoratge, entre d'altres, han de complir diferents requisits de QoS, com la fiabilitat i la puntualitat per a cada tipus de missatge rebut. A més, les tècniques d'agregació de dades tenen un paper important en WSN per reduir el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda. En aquesta tesi, proposem un mecanisme que proporciona a la aplicació tres nivells de QoS diferents: proporcionem una millora del nostre mecanisme de retransmissió anterior per a la fiabilitat, incloem l'agregació de dades en el nostre mecanisme de fiabilitat i proporcionem un mecanisme de puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets