IoT Transmission Technologies for Distributed Measurement Systems in Critical Environments

Distributed measurement systems are spread in the most diverse application scenarios, and Internet of Things (IoT) transmission equipment is usually the enabling technologies for such measurement systems that need to feature wireless connectivity to ensure pervasiveness. Because wireless measurement systems have been deployed for the last years even in critical environments, assessing transmission technologies performances in such contexts is fundamental. Indeed, they are the most challenging ones for wireless data transmission due to their intrinsic attenuation capabilities. Several scenarios in which measurement systems can be deployed are analysed. Firstly, marine contexts are treated by considering above-the-sea wireless links. Such setting can be experienced in whichever application requiring remote monitoring of facilities and assets that are offshore installed. Some instances are offshore sea farming plants, or remote video monitoring systems installed on seamark buoys. Secondly, wireless communications taking place from the underground to the aboveground are covered. This scenario is typical of precision agriculture applications, where the accurate measurement of underground physical parameters is needed to be remotely sent to optimise crops reducing the wastefulness of fundamental resources (e.g., irrigation water). Thirdly, wireless communications occurring from the underwater to the abovewater are addressed. Such situation is inevitable for all those infrastructures monitoring conservation status of underwater species like algae, seaweeds and reef. Then, wireless links happening traversing metal surfaces and structures are tackled. Such context is commonly encountered in asset tracking and monitoring (e.g., containers), or in smart metering applications (e.g., utility meters). Lastly, sundry harsh environments that are typical of industrial monitoring (e.g., vibrating machineries, harsh temperature and humidity rooms, corrosive atmospheres) are tested to validate pervasive measurement infrastructures even in such contexts that are usually experienced in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The performances of wireless measurement systems in such scenarios are tested by sorting out ad-hoc measurement campaigns. Finally, IoT measurement infrastructures respectively deployed in above-the-sea and underground-to-aboveground settings are described to provide real applications in which such facilities can be effectively installed. Nonetheless, the aforementioned application scenarios are only some amid their sundry variety. Indeed, nowadays distributed pervasive measurement systems have to be thought in a broad way, resulting in countless instances: predictive maintenance, smart healthcare, smart cities, industrial monitoring, or smart agriculture, etc. This Thesis aims at showing distributed measurement systems in critical environments to set up pervasive monitoring infrastructures that are enabled by IoT transmission technologies. At first, they are presented, and then the harsh environments are introduced, along with the relative theoretical analysis modelling path loss in such conditions. It must be underlined that this Thesis aims neither at finding better path loss models with respect to the existing ones, nor at improving them. Indeed, path loss models are exploited as they are, in order to derive estimates of losses to understand the effectiveness of the deployed infrastructure. In fact, some transmission tests in those contexts are described, along with providing examples of these types of applications in the field, showing the measurement infrastructures and the relative critical environments serving as deployment sites. The scientific relevance of this Thesis is evident since, at the moment, the literature lacks a comparative study like this, showing both transmission performances in critical environments, and the deployment of real IoT distributed wireless measurement systems in such contexts

Experimental Analysis of IoT Networks Based on LoRa/LoRaWAN under Indoor and Outdoor EnvirMedusonments: Performance and Limitations

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) has multiple applications in different fields. This concept allows physical devices to connect to the internet in order to establish a strong infrastructure that facilitates many device control and monitoring tasks. Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) communication protocols become widely used for IoT networks because of their low power consumption and the broad range communication. LPWA enables devices to transmit small amounts of data in a long distance. Among LPWA protocols, LoRa technology gained a lot of interest recently from the research community and many companies. LoRa is a long range and low power wireless communication technology regulated by the LoRaWAN standard. It can be o good candidate to deploy node network where long distance and extended battery life is required. A LoRaWAN architecture is deployed in a star-of-stars topology and based on a systematic evaluation of a long-term operation of the network monitoring. This works describes experimental results of testing LoRa in indoor and outdoor environments to understand how it works, evaluate its performance, and limitations. As expected, results show that LoRa performs better outdoor. It is also interesting to note that elevating the gateway in order to have a free line of sight with the IoT node, or close to it, increases the signal quality received by the end-node devices, and consequently, longer distances can be achieved

Development of Economic Water Usage Sensor and Cyber-Physical Systems Co-Simulation Platform for Home Energy Saving

In this thesis, two Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) approaches were considered to reduce residential building energy consumption. First, a flow sensor was developed for residential gas and electric storage water heaters. The sensor utilizes unique temperature changes of tank inlet and outlet pipes upon water draw to provide occupant hot water usage. Post processing of measured pipe temperature data was able to detect water draw events. Conservation of energy was applied to heater pipes to determine relative internal water flow rate based on transient temperature measurements. Correlations between calculated flow and actual flow were significant at a 95% confidence level. Using this methodology, a CPS water heater controller can activate existing residential storage water heaters according to occupant hot water demand. The second CPS approach integrated an open-source building simulation tool, EnergyPlus, into a CPS simulation platform developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST platform utilizes the High Level Architecture (HLA) co-simulation protocol for logical timing control and data communication. By modifying existing EnergyPlus co-simulation capabilities, NIST’s open-source platform was able to execute an uninterrupted simulation between a residential house in EnergyPlus and an externally connected thermostat controller. The developed EnergyPlus wrapper for HLA co-simulation can allow active replacement of traditional real-time data collection for building CPS development. As such, occupant sensors and simple home CPS product can allow greater residential participation in energy saving practices, saving up to 33% on home energy consumption nationally

Trick or Heat? Manipulating Critical Temperature-Based Control Systems Using Rectification Attacks

Temperature sensing and control systems are widely used in the closed-loop control of critical processes such as maintaining the thermal stability of patients, or in alarm systems for detecting temperature-related hazards. However, the security of these systems has yet to be completely explored, leaving potential attack surfaces that can be exploited to take control over critical systems. In this paper we investigate the reliability of temperature-based control systems from a security and safety perspective. We show how unexpected consequences and safety risks can be induced by physical-level attacks on analog temperature sensing components. For instance, we demonstrate that an adversary could remotely manipulate the temperature sensor measurements of an infant incubator to cause potential safety issues, without tampering with the victim system or triggering automatic temperature alarms. This attack exploits the unintended rectification effect that can be induced in operational and instrumentation amplifiers to control the sensor output, tricking the internal control loop of the victim system to heat up or cool down. Furthermore, we show how the exploit of this hardware-level vulnerability could affect different classes of analog sensors that share similar signal conditioning processes. Our experimental results indicate that conventional defenses commonly deployed in these systems are not sufficient to mitigate the threat, so we propose a prototype design of a low-cost anomaly detector for critical applications to ensure the integrity of temperature sensor signals.Comment: Accepted at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 201

Living IoT: A Flying Wireless Platform on Live Insects

Sensor networks with devices capable of moving could enable applications ranging from precision irrigation to environmental sensing. Using mechanical drones to move sensors, however, severely limits operation time since flight time is limited by the energy density of current battery technology. We explore an alternative, biology-based solution: integrate sensing, computing and communication functionalities onto live flying insects to create a mobile IoT platform. Such an approach takes advantage of these tiny, highly efficient biological insects which are ubiquitous in many outdoor ecosystems, to essentially provide mobility for free. Doing so however requires addressing key technical challenges of power, size, weight and self-localization in order for the insects to perform location-dependent sensing operations as they carry our IoT payload through the environment. We develop and deploy our platform on bumblebees which includes backscatter communication, low-power self-localization hardware, sensors, and a power source. We show that our platform is capable of sensing, backscattering data at 1 kbps when the insects are back at the hive, and localizing itself up to distances of 80 m from the access points, all within a total weight budget of 102 mg.Comment: Co-primary authors: Vikram Iyer, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Anran Wang, In Proceedings of Mobicom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages, 201

In-sewer field-evaluation of an optical fibre-based condition monitoring system

A Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) based monitoring system for continuous humidity and temperature measurement has been designed and evaluated experimentally in a sewer environment with high corrosion rates, humidity and the presence of gaseous hydrogen sulfide. The monitoring system has been designed specifically for field use, including packaging prepared for the harsh environment and the challenges of the operation. The system is battery powered and has hardware for controlling the interrogation equipment, power management, data logging and 4G connectivity. Results obtained show the long-term performance, over a 6-month period of non-stop monitoring of real-time data using the same probe. The data acquired was compared to the environmental data of temperature and precipitation for this period from the same location, which showed a good correlation between the expected and the measured data values. The data obtained point to the success of the optical fibre-based sensor system for monitoring in these harsh environments over long periods

Internet Of Things Based Wireless Sensor Network System For Water Quality Monitoring

Generally, rivers are the main resource of water for living thing. The river's water quality affects our health directly which can be harmful if we consume contaminated water. Thanks to the advancement of technology in current water quality monitoring (WQM) for safe water consuming. Basically, on-site WQM and continuous WQM are being extensively deployed in Malaysia. The on-site method provide high mobility, low operation cost and low probability of theft problem or equipment damage as there is no fixed installation at WQM spot is required. However it vulnerable to high probability of human error due to manual operation and non-consistent real-time data solution. Meanwhile, the continuous WQM or also known as automatic station-based WQM provides consistent real-time data solution with no human error during WQM process. But its disadvantages are low mobility, high probability of theft problem due to fixed equipment installation and involve high operation cost. Therefore, the objective of this study is to design a hybrid WQM system which can improve the current issues of both WQM methods through multiple wireless technologies embedment. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system, WSN and internet bandwidth are consolidated into one platform of Internet of Thing (IoT) ecosystem namely IoT for water quality monitoring (IoT-WQM) system is studied. The proposed IoT-WQM system provides real-time monitoring on pH level and ambient temperature and enhanced with mobile alert triggering system through mobile device. To achieve the objective of this study, a prototype of proposed system are designed and developed based on literature reviews. Then it was analyzed by several series of experiment to investigate its performance and characteristic. This includes frequency verification, energy analysis, anti-collision detection analysis, WSN range test analysis, throughput and network latency. Based on conducted analyses, the average percentage difference for pH measurement during wet weather condition are 0.31 % for IoT-WQM system and 0.28 % for standalone RFID system. While, the average percentage difference during dry weather condition for the IoT-WQM and standalone RFID systems are 0.36 % and 0.33 % respectively. The analysis of anti-collision detection shows a 100 % receiving efficiency of the transmitted information packet by transmitting IoT-WQM tags. The maximum outdoor range test result in LoS environment of IoT-WQM system based on extrapolation is 100 % identical with the XBee Pro specification which is 6.5 km. Meanwhile, the maximum reading of average RSSI value for multihop NLoS communication is -85 dBm at 1000 m distance. The average throughput of IoT-WQM system is 0.23% slightly higher than standalone RFID system for both encrypted and unencrypted modes. Meanwhile, the average latency of IoT-WQM system is slightly higher than standalone RFID system for both encrypted and unencrypted mode which are 0.12 % and 0.45 % respectively

Innovative IoT Solutions and Wearable Sensing Systems for Monitoring Human Biophysical Parameters: A Review

none3noDigital and information technologies are heavily pervading several aspects of human activities, improving our life quality. Health systems are undergoing a real technological revolution, radically changing how medical services are provided, thanks to the wide employment of the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms supporting advanced monitoring services and intelligent inferring systems. This paper reports, at first, a comprehensive overview of innovative sensing systems for monitoring biophysical and psychophysical parameters, all suitable for integration with wearable or portable accessories. Wearable devices represent a headstone on which the IoT-based healthcare platforms are based, providing capillary and real-time monitoring of patient’s conditions. Besides, a survey of modern architectures and supported services by IoT platforms for health monitoring is presented, providing useful insights for developing future healthcare systems. All considered architectures employ wearable devices to gather patient parameters and share them with a cloud platform where they are processed to provide real-time feedback. The reported discussion highlights the structural differences between the discussed frameworks, from the point of view of network configuration, data management strategy, feedback modality, etc.Article Number: 1660openRoberto De Fazio; Massimo De Vittorio; Paolo ViscontiDE FAZIO, Roberto; DE VITTORIO, Massimo; Visconti, Paol