Microsecond-Accuracy Time Synchronization Using the IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH Protocol

International audienceTime-Slotted Channel Hopping from the IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard requires that network nodes are tightly time-synchronized. Existing implementations of TSCH on embedded hardware are characterized by tens-of-microseconds large synchronization errors; higher synchronization accuracy would enable reduction of idle listening time on receivers, in this way decreasing the energy required to run TSCH. For some applications, it would also allow to replace dedicated time synchronization mechanisms with TSCH. We show that time synchronization errors in the existing TSCH implementations on embedded hardware are caused primarily by imprecise clock drift estimations, rather than by real unpredictable drift variance. By estimating clock drift more precisely and by applying adaptive time compensation on each node in the network, we achieve microsecond accuracy time synchronization on point-to-point links and a <2 microsecond end-to-end error in a 7-node line topology. Our solution is implemented in the Contiki operating system and tested on Texas Instruments CC2650-based nodes, equipped with common off-the-shelf hardware clock sources (20 ppm drift). Our implementation uses only standard TSCH control messages and is able to keep radio duty cycle below 1%

Temperature-Resilient Time Synchronization for the Internet of Things

Networks deployed in real-world conditions have to cope with dynamic, unpredictable environmental temperature changes. These changes affect the clock rate on network nodes, and can cause faster clock de-synchronization compared to situations where devices are operating under stable temperature conditions. Wireless network protocols such as Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) from the IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard are affected by this problem, since they require tight clock synchronization among all nodes for the network to remain operational. This paper proposes a method for autonomously compensating temperature-dependent clock rate changes. After a calibration stage, nodes continuously perform temperature measurements to compensate for clock drifts at run-time. The method is implemented on low-power IoT nodes and evaluated through experiments in a temperature chamber, indoor and outdoor environments, as well as with numerical simulations. The results show that applying the method reduces the maximum synchronization error more than 10 times. In this way, the method allows reduce the total energy spent for time synchronization, which is practically relevant concern for low data rate, low energy budget TSCH networks, especially those exposed to environments with changing temperature.This work was performed under the SPHERE IRC funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Grant EP/K031910/1. It was also partly funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761586 (5G-CORAL), the distributed environment Ecare@Home funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation, and by a grant from CPER Nord-PasdeCalais/ FEDER DATA

Competition: Adaptive Time-Slotted Channel Hopping

International audienceTime-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) from the IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard uses channel hopping to combat interference and frequency-selective fading. It has attracted large attention from the research community due to its properties: high reliability in terms of packet delivery rates, and increased predictability in terms of energy consumption and latency, as compared to commonly used low-power CSMA MAC protocols. This work makes use of the Contiki OS implementation of the TSCH protocol. We extend the standardized TSCH protocol with adaptive channel selection, adaptive time synchronization , and adaptive guard time selection to improve its energy efficiency and reliability properties

Exploração de Covert Channels de Rede sobre comunicações IEEE 802.15.4

The advancements in information and communication technology in the past decades have been converging into a new communication paradigm in which everything is expected to be interconnected with the heightened pervasiveness and ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. As these technologies mature, they are increasingly finding its way into more sensitive domains, such as Medical and Industrial IoT, in which safety and cyber-security are paramount. While the number of deployed IoT devices continues to increase annually, up to tens of billions of connected devices, IoT devices continue to present severe cyber-security vulnerabilities, which are worsened by challenges such as scalability, heterogeneity, and their often scarce computing capacity. Network covert channels are increasingly being used to support malware with stealthy behaviours, aiming at exfiltrating data or to orchestrate nodes of a botnet in a cloaked fashion. Nevertheless, the attention to this problem regarding underlying and pervasive IoT protocols such as the IEEE 802.15.4 has been scarce. Therefore, in this Thesis, we aim at analysing the performance and feasibility of such covertchannel implementations upon the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol to support the development of new mechanisms and add-ons that can effectively contribute to improve the current state of-art of IoT systems which rely on such, or similar underlying communication technologies.Os avanços nas tecnologias de informação e comunicação nas últimas décadas têm convergido num novo paradigma de comunicação, onde se espera que todos os intervenientes estejam interconectados pela ubiquidade do paradigma da Internet of Things (Internet das Coisas). Com a maturação destas tecnologias, elas têm-se vindo a infiltrar em domínios cada vez mais sensíveis, como nas aplicações médicas e industriais, onde a confiabilidade da informação e cyber-segurança são um fator crítico. Num contexto onde o número de dispositivos IoT continua a aumentar anualmente, já na ordem das dezenas de biliões de dispositivos interconectados, estes continuam, contudo, a apresentar severas vulnerabilidades no campo da cyber-segurança, sendo que os desafios como a escalabilidade, heterogeneidade e, na maioria das vezes, a sua baixa capacidade de processamento, tornam ainda mais complexa a sua resolução de forma permanente. Os covert channels de rede são cada vez mais um meio de suporte a malwares que apresentam comportamentos furtivos, almejando a extração de informação sensível ou a orquestração de nós de uma botnet de uma forma camuflada. Contudo, a atenção dada a este problema em protocolos de rede IoT abrangentes como o IEEE 802.15.4, tem sido escassa. Portanto, nesta tese, pretende-se elaborar uma análise da performance e da viabilidade da implementação de covert channels em modelos de rede onde figura o protocolo IEEE 802.15.4 de forma a suportar o desenvolvimento de novos mecanismos e complementos que podem efetivamente contribuir para melhorar a ciber-segurança de sistemas IoT que dependem do suporte destas tecnologias de comunicação

Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-hop Bluetooth 5

Bluetooth is an omnipresent communication technology, available on billions of connected devices today.While it has been traditionally limited to peer-to-peer and star network topology, the recent Bluetooth 5 standard introduces new operating modes to allow for increased reliability and Bluetooth Mesh supports multi-hop networking based on message flooding.In this paper, we present BlueFlood.It adapts concurrent transmissions, as introduced by Glossy, to Bluetooth.The result is fast and efficient network-wide data dissemination in multi-hop Bluetooth networks.Moreover, we show that BlueFlood floods can be reliably received by off-the-shelf Bluetooth devices such as smart phones, opening new applications of concurrent transmissions and seamless integration with existing technologies. We present an in-depth experimental feasibility study of concurrent transmissions over Bluetooth PHY in a controlled environment.Further, we build a small-scale testbed where we evaluate BlueFlood in real-world settings of a residential environment.We show that\ua0BlueFlood achieves 99% end-to-end delivery ratio in multi-hop networks with a duty cycle of 0.13% for 1-second intervals

Scheduling High-Rate Unpredictable Traffic in IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH Networks

© 2017 IEEE. The upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) applications include real-time human activity monitoring with wearable sensors. Compared to the traditional environmental sensing with low-power wireless nodes, these new applications generate a constant stream of a much higher rate. Nevertheless, the wearable devices remain battery powered and therefore restricted to low-power wireless standards such as IEEE 802.15.4 or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Our work tackles the problem of building a reliable autonomous schedule for forwarding this kind of dynamic data in IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH networks. Due to the a priori unpredictability of these data source locations, the quality of the wireless links, and the routing topology of the forwarding network, it is wasteful to reserve the number of slots required for the worst-case scenario, under conditions of high expected datarate, it is downright impossible. The solution we propose is a hybrid approach where dedicated TSCH cells and shared TSCH slots coexist in the same schedule. We show that under realistic assumptions of wireless link diversity, adding shared slots to a TSCH schedule increases the overall packet delivery rate and the fairness of the system