On the Capability of Smartphones to Perform as Communication Gateways in Medical Wireless Personal Area Networks

This paper evaluates and characterizes the technical performance of medical wireless personal area networks (WPANs) that are based on smartphones. For this purpose, a prototype of a health telemonitoring system is presented. The prototype incorporates a commercial Android smartphone, which acts as a relay point, or “gateway”, between a set of wireless medical sensors and a data server. Additionally, the paper investigates if the conventional capabilities of current commercial smartphones can be affected by their use as gateways or “Holters” in health monitoring applications. Specifically, the profiling has focused on the CPU and power consumption of the mobile devices. These metrics have been measured under several test conditions modifying the smartphone model, the type of sensors connected to the WPAN, the employed Bluetooth profile (SPP (serial port profile) or HDP (health device profile)), the use of other peripherals, such as a GPS receiver, the impact of the use of theWi-Fi interface or the employed method to encode and forward the data that are collected from the sensors.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2009-13763-C02-0

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Intelligent Personal Assistants Solutions in Ubiquitous Environments in the Context of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) will create the opportunity to develop new types of businesses. Every tangible object, biologic or not, will be identified by a unique address, creating a common network composed by billions of devices. Those devices will have different requirements, creating the necessity of finding new mechanisms to satisfy the needs of all the entities within the network. This is one of the main problems that all the scientific community should address in order to make Internet of Things the Future Internet. Currently, IoT is used in a lot of projects involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensors are generally cheap and small devices able to generate useful information from physical indicators. They can be used on smart home scenarios, or even on healthcare environments, turning sensors into useful devices to accomplish the goals of many use case scenarios. Sensors and other devices with some reasoning capabilities, like smart objects, can be used to create smart environments. The interaction between the objects in those scenarios and humans can be eased by the inclusion of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, IPAs have good reasoning capabilities, improving the assistance they give to their owners. Artificial intelligence (AI), new learning mechanisms, and the evolution assisted in speech technology also contributed to this improvement. The integration of IPAs in IoT scenarios can become a case of great success. IPAs will comprehend the behavior of their owners not only through direct interactions, but also by the interactions they have with other objects in the environment. This may create ubiquitous communication scenarios where humans act as passive elements, being adequately informed of all the aspects of interest that surrounds them. The communication between IPAs and other objects in their surrounding environment may use gateways for traffic forwarding. On ubiquitous environments devices can be mobile or static. For example, in smart home scenarios, objects are generally static, being always on the same position. In mobile health scenarios, objects can move from one place to another. To turn IPAs useful on all types of environments, static and mobile gateways should be developed. On this dissertation, a novel mobile gateway solution for an IPA platform inserted on an IoT context is proposed. A mobile health scenario was chosen. Then, a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is always monitoring a person, giving the real time feedback of his/her health status to another person responsible by him (designated caretaker). On this scenario, a mobile gateway is needed to forward the traffic between the BSN and the IPA of the caretaker. Therefore, the IPA is able to give warnings about the health status of the person under monitoring, in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype, where the more important aspects for IPAs and IoT networks are considered

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Performance Evaluation of Energy-Autonomous Sensors Using Power-Harvesting Beacons for Environmental Monitoring in Internet of Things (IoT)

Environmental conditions and air quality monitoring have become crucial today due to the undeniable changes of the climate and accelerated urbanization. To efficiently monitor environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and the levels of pollutants, such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air, and to collect data covering vast geographical areas, the development of cheap energy-autonomous sensors for large scale deployment and fine-grained data acquisition is required. Rapid advances in electronics and communication technologies along with the emergence of paradigms such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the development of low-cost sensor devices that can operate unattended for long periods of time and communicate using wired or wireless connections through the Internet. We investigate the energy efficiency of an environmental monitoring system based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons that operate in the IoT environment. The beacons developed measure the temperature, the relative humidity, the light intensity, and the CO2 and VOC levels in the air. Based on our analysis we have developed efficient sleep scheduling algorithms that allow the sensor nodes developed to operate autonomously without requiring the replacement of the power supply. The experimental results show that low-power sensors communicating using BLE technology can operate autonomously (from the energy perspective) in applications that monitor the environment or the air quality in indoor or outdoor settings

Security Frameworks for Machine-to-Machine Devices and Networks

Attacks against mobile systems have escalated over the past decade. There have been increases of fraud, platform attacks, and malware. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a new attack vector for Cybercriminals. M2M contributes to the growing number of devices that use wireless systems for Internet connection. As new applications and platforms are created, old vulnerabilities are transferred to next-generation systems. There is a research gap that exists between the current approaches for security framework development and the understanding of how these new technologies are different and how they are similar. This gap exists because system designers, security architects, and users are not fully aware of security risks and how next-generation devices can jeopardize safety and personal privacy. Current techniques, for developing security requirements, do not adequately consider the use of new technologies, and this weakens countermeasure implementations. These techniques rely on security frameworks for requirements development. These frameworks lack a method for identifying next generation security concerns and processes for comparing, contrasting and evaluating non-human device security protections. This research presents a solution for this problem by offering a novel security framework that is focused on the study of the “functions and capabilities” of M2M devices and improves the systems development life cycle for the overall IoT ecosystem

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Interoperability in IoT

Interoperability refers to the ability of IoT systems and components to communicate and share information among them. This crucial feature is key to unlock all of the IoT paradigm´s potential, including immense technological, economic, and social benefits. Interoperability is currently a major challenge in IoT, mainly due to the lack of a reference standard and the vast heterogeneity of IoT systems. IoT interoperability has also a significant importance in big data analytics because it substantively eases data processing. This chapter analyzes the critical importance of IoT interoperability, its different types, challenges to face, diverse use cases, and prospective interoperability solutions. Given that it is a complex concept that involves multiple aspects and elements of IoT, for a deeper insight, interoperability is studied across different levels of IoT systems. Furthermore, interoperability is also re-examined from a global approach among platforms and systems.González-Usach, R.; Yacchirema-Vargas, DC.; Julián-Seguí, M.; Palau Salvador, CE. (2019). Interoperability in IoT. Handbook of Research on Big Data and the IoT. 149-173. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/150250S14917