OMA LWM2M in a holistic architecture for the Internet of Things

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) allow applications to interact with the physical world using nodes in an Internet of Things (IoT). Application level protocols such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and data models such as IPSO Smart Objects and the Open Mobile Alliance Lightweight Specification (OMA LWM2M) have the potential to provide greater application interoperability and to ease the difficulties imposed by the heterogeneous nature, limited development environments and interfaces of existing solutions. This paper describes an architecture using a tuple-space based library for the flow of data from sensors to applications with defined service abstractions. It also compares the OMA LWM2M Information Model and the DMTF Common Information Model. It presents a `C' implementation of the OMA LWM2M model on our tuple-space running on the Contiki3.0 OS and considers the effectiveness of our architecture and its integration with existing CoAP and OMA LWM2M implementations

Message queue telemetry transport and lightweight machine-to-machine comparison based on performance efficiency under various scenarios

Internet of things (IoT) is been advancing over a long period of time in many aspects. For data transfer between IoT devices in a wireless sensor network, various IoT protocols are proposed. Among them, the most widely used are constrained application protocol (CoAP) and message queue telemetry transport (MQTT). Overcoming the limitations of CoAP, lightweight machine-to-machine (LwM2M) framework was designed above CoAP. Recent statistics show that LwM2M and MQTT are the widely used, but LwM2M is still less used than MQTT. Our paper is aimed at comparing both MQTT and LwM2M on the basis of performance efficiency, which will be achieved by sending same file through both protocols to the server. Performance efficiency will be calculated in two scenarios, i) when the client makes a connection with the server i.e., while initial connection and ii) while sending data file to server i.e., while data transfer. Both the protocols will be tested on the number of packets sent and the variability of packet size throughout the session. Experimental results indicated that LwM2M outperformed MQTT in both above scenarios by almost 69%. Therefore, we concluded by stating that LwM2M is best choice over MQTT, but MQTT can still be used in some situations if necessary

A holistic architecture using peer to peer (P2P) protocols for the internet of things and wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) interact with the physical world using sensing and/or actuation. The wireless capability of WSN nodes allows them to be deployed close to the sensed phenomenon. Cheaper processing power and the use of micro IP stacks allow nodes to form an “Internet of Things” (IoT) integrating the physical world with the Internet in a distributed system of devices and applications. Applications using the sensor data may be located across the Internet from the sensor network, allowing Cloud services and Big Data approaches to store and analyse this data in a scalable manner, supported by new approaches in the area of fog and edge computing. Furthermore, the use of protocols such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and data models such as IPSO Smart Objects have supported the adoption of IoT in a range of scenarios. IoT has the potential to become a realisation of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing where tiny networked computers become woven into everyday life. This presents the challenge of being able to scale the technology down to resource-constrained devices and to scale it up to billions of devices. This will require seamless interoperability and abstractions that can support applications on Cloud services and also on node devices with constrained computing and memory capabilities, limited development environments and requirements on energy consumption. This thesis proposes a holistic architecture using concepts from tuple-spaces and overlay Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. This architecture is termed as holistic, because it considers the flow of the data from sensors through to services. The key contributions of this work are: development of a set of architectural abstractions to provide application layer interoperability, a novel cache algorithm supporting leases, a tuple-space based data store for local and remote data and a Peer to Peer (P2P) protocol with an innovative use of a DHT in building an overlay network. All these elements are designed for implementation on a resource constrained node and to be extensible to server environments, which is shown in a prototype implementation. This provides the basis for a new P2P holistic approach that will allow Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT to operate in a self-organising ad hoc manner in order to deliver the promise of IoT

Design and evaluation of a scalable Internet of Things backend for smart ports

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, when adequately integrated, cater for logistics optimisation and operations' environmental impact monitoring, both key aspects for today's EU ports management. This article presents Obelisk, a scalable and multi-tenant cloud-based IoT integration platform used in the EU H2020 PortForward project. The landscape of IoT protocols being particularly fragmented, the first role of Obelisk is to provide uniform access to data originating from a myriad of devices and protocols. Interoperability is achieved through adapters that provide flexibility and evolvability in protocol and format mapping. Additionally, due to ports operating in a hub model with various interacting actors, a second role of Obelisk is to secure access to data. This is achieved through encryption and isolation for data transport and processing, respectively, while user access control is ensured through authentication and authorisation standards. Finally, as ports IoTisation will further evolve, a third need for Obelisk is to scale with the data volumes it must ingest and process. Platform scalability is achieved by means of a reactive micro-services based design. Those three essential characteristics are detailed in this article with a specific focus on how to achieve IoT data platform scalability. By means of an air quality monitoring use-case deployed in the city of Antwerp, the scalability of the platform is evaluated. The evaluation shows that the proposed reactive micro-service based design allows for horizontal scaling of the platform as well as for logarithmic time complexity of its service time

Contracting Service for Industrial Internet

Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging vision of a world, where machines can communicate with each other and with people. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a subset of IoT applications used for industrial purposes. Since this vision is relatively new, current IIoT applications do not follow communication standards. Although, many standards have recently been proposed, however none of them are widely accepted. Moreover, all of the device management platforms are proprietary, thus restricting interoperability. This thesis proposes a new web platform for management of devices in terms of access control. To choose the appropriate standard many standards were studied and presented, such as World Wide Web Consortium - Web of Things (W3C WOT) and Light-Weight Machine to Machine (LWM2M). Requirements for this platform were gathered by carefully examining the use cases of smart industrial machines. The underlying principles for the platform is the division of tasks among user groups, e.g., manufacturer and customer. For instance, manufacturers responsibility is to add machines to the platform and assign them to customers; Customer is tasked with defining who has access to their machines by manipulating policies. This web platform was developed and evaluated in line with the requirements and based on LWM2M and Policy Based Communications research

Using a DHT in a Peer to Peer architecture for the Internet of Things

A challenging aspect of The Internet of Things (IoT) is to provide an architecture that can handle the range of IoT elements ranging from Cloud-based applications to constrained nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Such an architecture must be scalable, allow seamless operation across networks and devices with little human intervention. This paper describes a set of abstractions and an architecture for the flow of data from sensors to applications supported by a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and our novel Holistic Peer to Peer (HPP) Application Layer protocol to handle node ids, capabilities, services and sensor data. We show that this architecture can operate in a constrained node by presenting a `C' implementation running on the Contiki3.0 OS and consider the effectiveness of its use of a DHT and its abstractions

Reprogramming Low-end IoT Devices from the Cloud

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) consists in a variety of smart connected objects, among which a category of low-end devices based on micro-controllers. The orchestration of low-end IoT devices is not straightforward because of the lack of generic and holistic solutions articulating cloud-based tools on one hand, and low-end IoT device software on the other hand. In this paper, we describe such a solution, combining a cloud-based IDE, graphical programming, and automatic JavaScript generation. Scripts are pushed over the Internet and over-the-air for the last hop, updating runtime containers hosted on heterogeneous low-end IoT devices running RIOT. We demonstrate a prototype working on common off-the-shelf low-end IoT hardware with as little as 32kB of memory

How to see through the Fog? Using Peer to Peer (P2P) for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) faces the challenge of scaling to handle tens of billions of connected devices. This challenge is made more difficult by the range of constituent IoT parts from Cloud-based applications to constrained nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Achieving the desired scale and interoperability requires an architecture for IoT that is scalable and allows seamless operation across networks and devices. This paper considers the requirements for IoT and considers a number of existing architectural approaches and the emergence of Fog computing. It proposes that Fog computing architectures must cater for the flow of data from constrained sensor nodes to powerful applications. It considers the suitability of a Peer to Peer (P2P) approach for Fog computing. Using a prototype implementation, it demonstrates how a Holistic Peer to Peer (HPP) architecture and application layer protocol meet the requirements set for IoT

User interface design of meta model repository for IoT devices

Internet of Things (IoT) has become prevalent in recent years. IoT works as a gigantic network in which the vast set of devices are integrated and interconnected. These devices include sensors, gateways and other smart objects. Accordingly, plenty of data models are produced to define and describe IoT devices by various organizations and manufacturers. Those data models significantly help in device management. However, it seems that the sharing and presenting of data models is not so effective. For a variety of organizations have different standardized ways exist to manage and present data models. Particularly, one device may have multiple data models. They are generated as diverse data formats of defining a device and distributed in different platforms. Consequently, to facilitate developers and enterprises’ work with data models, existing practices of data model management still need to be upgraded. This master’s thesis proposes a user interface design solution for a meta model repository for IoT devices. Based on the exploration of various collaboration platforms, it analyses the selected platform with its aspects that make it easy to share the models while allow collaboration. Additionally, the study includes the research work on exploring current state of data models. The analysis of different collaboration platforms is also reported. Throughout the design process, user-centered design (UCD) methodology was applied to help create a usable repository in terms of both its user interface and its functionality. In this regard, two rounds of usability testing (6 and 7 participants, respectively) were conducted, which aimed to collect insights and requirements from users. The relevant results are presented and discussed. The outcome of this thesis is a functional meta model repository which has been designed iteratively during user tests. It starts with support of Lightweight machine to machine (LWM2M) data models. With more data models appear, the repository will be more valuable and significant. More importantly, the repository can be extended to machine to machine communication in future. Therefore, the result of this thesis also demonstrates perceptions about the possibilities of the repository in future use