17 research outputs found
Connecting the World of Embedded Mobiles: The RIOT Approach to Ubiquitous Networking for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant
protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering
implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained
devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a
minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and
massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and
flexible network stacks.
This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a
powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking
offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in
drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous
interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its
cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an
in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of
RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT
communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is
based on significantly different design trade-offs, the networking subsystem of
RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two
operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms
A Review of Low-end, Middle-end and High-end IoT Devices
Internet of Things (IoT) devices play a crucial role in the overall development of IoT in providing countless applications in various areas. Due to the increasing interest and rapid technological growth of sensor technology, which have certainly revolutionized the way we live today, a need to provide a detailed analysis of the embedded platforms and boards is consequential. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent and most-widely used commercial and research embedded systems and boards in different classification emphasizing their key attributes including processing and memory capabilities, security features, connectivity and communication interfaces, size, cost and appearance, operating system (OS) support, power specifications and battery life and listing some interesting projects for each device. Through this exploration and discussion, readers can have an overall understanding on this area and foster more subsequent studies
Managing Mobility for Distributed Smart Cities Services
The IoT refers to the idea of internetworking physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and any other item embedded with the appropriate electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity to allows them to interchange data and to provide highly effective new services. In this thesis we focus on the communications issues of the IoT in relation to mobility and we provide different solutions to alleviate the impact of these potential problems and to guarantee the information delivery in mobile scenarios.
Our reference context is a Smart City where various mobile devices collaboratively participate, periodically sending information from their sensors. We assume that these services are located in platforms based in cloud infrastructures where the information is protected through the use of virtualisation ensuring their security and privacy.
This thesis is structured into seven chapters. We first detail our objectives and identify the current problems we intend to address. Next, we provide a thorough review of the state of the art of all the areas involved in our work, highlighting how we improved the existing solutions with our research. The overall approach of the solutions we propose in this thesis use prototypes that encompasses and integrates different technologies and standards in a small infrastructure, using real devices in real scenarios with two of the most commonly used networks around the world: WiFi and 802.15.4 to efficiently solve the problems we originally identified.
We focussed on protocols based on a producer/consumer paradigm, namely AMQP and particularly MQTT. We observed the behaviour of these protocols using in lab experiments and in external environments, using a mesh wireless network as the backbone network. Various issues raised by mobility were taken into consideration, and thus, we repeated the tests with different messages sizes and different inter-message periodicity, in order to model different possible applications. We also present a model for dimensioning the number of sources for mobile nodes and calculating the number of buffers required in the mobile node as a function of the number of sources and the size of the messages.
We included a mechanism for avoiding data loss based on intermediate buffering adapted to the MQTT protocol that, in conjunction with the use of an alternative to the Network Manager in certain contexts, improves the connection establishment for wireless mobile clients. We also performed a detailed study of the jitter behaviour of a mobile node when transmitting messages with this proposal while moving through a real outdoor scenario. To emulate simple IoT networks we used the Cooja simulator to study and determine the effects on the probability of delivering messages when both publishers and subscribers were added to different scenarios. Finally we present an approach that combines the MQTT protocol with DTN which we specifically designed for constrained environments and guarantees that important information will never be lost.
The advantage of our proposed solutions is that they make an IoT system more resilient to changes in the point of attachment of the mobile devices in an IoT network without requiring IoT application & service developers to explicitly consider this issue. Moreover, our solutions do not require additional support from the network through protocols such as MobileIP or LISP. We close the thesis by providing some conclusions, and identifying future lines of work which we unable to address here.Internet de las cosas (IoT) se refiere a la idea de interconectar sensores, actuadores, dispositivos físicos, vehículos, edificios y cualquier elemento dotado de la electrónica, así como del software y de la conectividad de red que los hace capaces de intercambiar datos para proporcionar servicios altamente efectivos.
En esta tesis nos centramos en temas relacionados con la comunicación de sistemas IoT, específicamente en situaciones de movilidad y en los problemas que esto conlleva. Con este fin ofrecemos diferentes soluciones que alivian su impacto y garantizan la entrega de información en estas situaciones.
El contexto de referencia es una ciudad inteligente donde varios dispositivos móviles participan de forma colaborativa enviando periódicamente información desde sus sensores hacia servicios ubicados en plataformas en la nube (cloud computing) donde mediante el uso de virtualización, la información está protegida garantizando su seguridad y privacidad.
Las soluciones propuestas en esta tesis se enfocan en probar sobre una pequeña infraestructura un prototipo que abarca e integra diferentes tecnologías y estándares para resolver eficientemente los problemas previamente identificados. Hemos enfocado nuestro esfuerzo en el uso de dispositivos sobre escenarios reales con dos de las redes más extendidas en todo el mundo: WiFi y enlaces 802.15.4.
Nos enfocamos en protocolos que ofrecen el paradigma productor/consumidor como el protocolo avanzado de colas de mensajes (AMQP) y particularmente el protocolo de transporte de mensajes telemétricos (MQTT), observamos su comportamiento a través de experimentos en laboratorio y en pruebas al aire libre, repitiendo las pruebas con diferentes tamaños de mensajes y diferente periodicidad entre mensajes. Para modelar las diferentes posibles aplicaciones de la propuesta, se tomaron en consideración varias cuestiones planteadas por la movilidad, resultando en un modelo para dimensionar eficientemente el número de fuentes para un nodo móvil y para calcular el tamaño requerido del buffer, en función del número de fuentes y del tamaño de los mensajes.
Proponemos un mecanismo adaptado al protocolo MQTT que evita la pérdida de datos en clientes móviles, basado en un buffer intermedio entre la producción y publicación de mensajes que, en conjunto con el uso de una alternativa al gestor de conexiones inalámbricas "Network Manager", en ciertos contextos mejora el establecimiento de las conexiones. Para la evaluación de esta propuesta se presenta un estudio detallado de un nodo móvil que se mueve en un escenario real al aire libre, donde estudiamos el comportamiento del jitter y la transmisión de mensajes.
Además, hemos utilizado emuladores de redes IoT para estudiar y determinar los efectos sobre la probabilidad de entrega de mensajes, cuando se agregan tanto publicadores como suscriptores a diferentes escenarios. Finalmente, se presenta una solución totalmente orientada a entornos con dispositivos de recursos limitados que combina los protocolos MQTT con redes tolerantes a retardos (DTN) para garantizar la entrega de información.
La ventaja de las soluciones que proponemos reside en el hecho de que los sistemas IoT se vuelven resilientes a la movilidad y a los cambios de punto de acceso, permitiendo así que los desarrolladores creen fácilmente aplicaciones y servicios IoT evitando considerar estos problema. Otra ventaja de nuestras soluciones es que no necesitan soporte adicional de la red como sucede con protocolos como MobileIP o el protocolo que separa el identificador del localizador (LISP). Se destaca cómo hemos mejorado las soluciones existentes hasta el momento de la escritura de esta disertación, y se identifican futuras líneas de actuación que no han sido contempladas.Internet de les coses (IoT) es refereix a la idea d'interconnectar sensors, actuadors, dispositius físics, vehicles, edificis i qualsevol element dotat de l'electrònica, així com del programari i de la connectivitat de xarxa que els fa capaces d'intercanviar dades per proporcionar serveis altament efectius.
En aquesta tesi ens centrem en temes relacionats amb la comunicació de sistemes IoT, específicament en situacions de mobilitat i en els problemes que això comporta. A aquest efecte oferim diferents solucions que alleugeren el seu impacte i garanteixen el lliurament d'informació en aquestes situacions.
El context de referència és una ciutat intel·ligent on diversos dispositius mòbils participen de forma col·laborativa enviant periòdicament informació des dels seus sensors cap a serveis situats en plataformes en el núvol (cloud computing) on mitjançant l'ús de virtualització, la informació està protegida garantint la seva seguretat i privadesa.
Les solucions proposades en aquesta tesi s'enfoquen a provar sobre una xicoteta infraestructura un prototip que abasta i integra diferents tecnologies i estàndards per a resoldre eficientment els problemes prèviament identificats. Hem enfocat el nostre esforç en l'ús de dispositius sobre escenaris reals amb dos de les xarxes més esteses a tot el món: WiFi i enllaços 802.15.4.
Ens enfoquem en protocols que ofereixen el paradigma productor/consumidor com el protocol avançat de cues de missatges (AMQP) i particularment el protocol de transport de missatges telemètrics (MQTT), observem el seu comportament a través d'experiments en laboratori i en proves a l'aire lliure, repetint les proves amb diferents grandàries de missatges i diferent periodicitat entre missatges. Per a modelar les diferents possibles aplicacions de la proposta, es van prendre en consideració diverses qüestions plantejades per la mobilitat, resultant en un model per a dimensionar eficientment el nombre de fonts per a un node mòbil i per a calcular la grandària requerida del buffer, en funció del nombre de fonts i de la grandària dels missatges.
Proposem un mecanisme adaptat al protocol MQTT que evita la pèrdua de dades per a clients mòbils, basat en un buffer intermedi entre la producció i publicació de missatges que en conjunt amb l'ús d'una alternativa al gestor de connexions sense fils "Network Manager'', en certs contextos millora l'establiment de les connexions. Per a l'avaluació d'aquesta proposta es presenta un estudi detallat d'un node mòbil que es mou en un escenari real a l'aire lliure, on estudiem el comportament del jitter i la transmissió de missatges.
A més, hem utilitzat emuladors de xarxes IoT per a estudiar i determinar els efectes sobre la probabilitat de lliurament de missatges, quan s'agreguen tant publicadors com subscriptors a diferents escenaris. Finalment, es presenta una solució totalment orientada a entorns amb dispositius de recursos limitats que combina els protocols MQTT amb xarxes tolerants a retards (DTN) per a garantir el lliurament d'informació.
L'avantatge de les solucions que proposem resideix en el fet que els sistemes IoT es tornen resilients a la mobilitat i als canvis de punt d'accés, permetent així que els desenvolupadors creuen fàcilment aplicacions i serveis IoT evitant considerar aquests problema. Un altre avantatge de les nostres solucions és que no necessiten suport addicional de la xarxa com succeeix amb protocols com MobileIP o el protocol que separa l'identificador del localitzador (LISP). Es destaca com hem millorat les solucions existents fins al moment de l'escriptura d'aquesta dissertació, i s'identifican futures línies d'actuació que no han sigut contemplades.Luzuriaga Quichimbo, JE. (2017). Managing Mobility for Distributed Smart Cities Services [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/84744TESI
A sensor node soC architecture for extremely autonomous wireless sensor networks
Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Eletrónica e de Computadores (PDEEC) (especialidade em Informática Industrial e Sistemas Embebidos)The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the Internet of the future and the
way new smart objects and people are being connected into the world. Its pervasive
computing and communication technologies connect myriads of smart devices, presented
at our everyday things and surrounding objects. Big players in the industry
forecast, by 2020, around 50 billion of smart devices connected in a multitude of scenarios
and heterogeneous applications, sharing data over a true worldwide network.
This will represent a trillion dollar market that everyone wants to take a share.
In a world where everything is being connected, device security and device interoperability
are a paramount. From the sensor to the cloud, this triggers several
technological issues towards connectivity, interoperability and security requirements
on IoT devices. However, fulfilling such requirements is not straightforward. While
the connectivity exposes the device to the Internet, which also raises several security
issues, deploying a standardized communication stack on the endpoint device
in the network edge, highly increases the data exchanged over the network. Moreover,
handling such ever-growing amount of data on resource-constrained devices,
truly affects the performance and the energy consumption. Addressing such issues
requires new technological and architectural approaches to help find solutions to
leverage an accelerated, secure and energy-aware IoT end-device communication.
Throughout this thesis, the developed artifacts triggered the achievement of important
findings that demonstrate: (1) how heterogeneous architectures are nowadays
a perfect solution to deploy endpoint devices in scenarios where not only (heavy
processing) application-specific operations are required, but also network-related capabilities
are major concerns; (2) how accelerating network-related tasks result in a
more efficient device resources utilization, which combining better performance and
increased availability, contributed to an improved overall energy utilization; (3) how
device and data security can benefit from modern heterogeneous architectures that
rely on secure hardware platforms, which are also able to provide security-related
acceleration hardware; (4) how a domain-specific language eases the co-design and
customization of a secure and accelerated IoT endpoint device at the network edge.Internet of Things (IoT) é o conceito que está a revolucionar a Internet do futuro
e a forma como coisas, processos e pessoas se conectam e se relacionam numa infraestrutura
de rede global que interligará, num futuro próximo, um vasto número de
dispositivos inteligentes e de utilização diária. Com uma grande aposta no mercado
IoT por parte dos grandes líderes na industria, algumas visões otimistas preveem
para 2020 mais de 50 mil milhões de dispositivos ligados na periferia da rede, partilhando
grandes volumes de dados importantes através da Internet, representando
um mercado multimilionário com imensas oportunidades de negócio.
Num mundo interligado de dispositivos, a interoperabilidade e a segurança é uma
preocupação crescente. Tal preocupação exige inúmeros esforços na exploração de
novas soluções, quer a nível tecnológico quer a nível arquitetural, que visem impulsionar
o desenvolvimento de dispositivos embebidos com maiores capacidades de
desempenho, segurança e eficiência energética, não só apenas do dispositivo em si,
mas também das camadas e protocolos de rede associados. Apesar da integração
de pilhas de comunicação e de protocolos standard das camadas de rede solucionar
problemas associados à conectividade e a interoperabilidade, adiciona a sobrecarga
inerente dos protocolos de comunicação e do crescente volume de dados partilhados
entre os dispositivos e a Internet, afetando severamente o desempenho e a disponibilidade
do mesmo, refletindo-se num maior consumo energético global.
As soluções apresentadas nesta tese permitiram obter resultados que demonstram:
(1) a viabilidade de soluções heterogéneas no desenvolvimento de dispositivos IoT,
onde não só tarefas inerentes à aplicação podem ser aceleradas, mas também tarefas
relacionadas com a comunicação do dispositivo; (2) os benefícios da aceleração de
tarefas e protocolos da pilha de rede, que se traduz num melhor desempenho do
dispositivo e aumento da disponibilidade do mesmo, contribuindo para uma melhor
eficiência energética; (3) que plataformas de hardware modernas oferecem mecanismos
de segurança que podem ser utilizados não apenas em prol da segurança do
dispositivo, mas também nas capacidades de comunicação do mesmo; (4) que o desenvolvimento
de uma linguagem de domínio específico permite de forma mais eficaz
e eficiente o desenvolvimento e configuração de dispositivos IoT inteligentes.This thesis was supported by a PhD scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, SFRH/BD/90162/201
Energy Measurement and Profiling of Internet of Things Devices
As technological improvements in hardware and software have grown in leaps and bounds, the presence of IoT devices has been increasing at a fast rate. Profiling and minimizing energy consumption on these devices remains to be an an essential step towards employing them in various application domains. Due to the large size and high cost of commercial energy measurement platforms, the research community has proposed alternative solutions that aim to be simple, accurate, and user friendly. However, these solutions are either costly, have a limited measurement range, or low accuracy. In addition, minimizing energy consumption in IoT devices is paramount to their wide deployment in various IoT scenarios. Energy saving methods such as duty-cycling aim to address this constraint by limiting the amount of time the device is powered on. This process needs to be optimized, as devices are now able to perform complex, but energy intensive tasks due to advancements in hardware.
The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First we develop an energy measurement platform for IoT devices. This platform should be accurate, low-cost, easy to build, and configurable in order to scale to the high volume and varying requirements for IoT devices. The second contribution is improving the energy consumption on a Linux-based IoT device in a duty-cycled scenario. It is important to profile and optimize boot up time and shutdown time, and improve the way user applications are executed.
EMPIOT is an accurate, low-cost, easy to build, and flexible power measurement platform. We present the hardware and software components that comprise EMPIOT and then study the effect of various design parameters on accuracy. In particular, we analyze the effect of driver, bus speed, input voltage, and buffering mechanisms on sampling rate, measurement accuracy, and processing demand. In addition to this, we also propose a novel calibration technique and report the calibration parameters under different settings. In order to demonstrate EMPIOT\u27s scalability, we evaluate its performance against a ground truth on five different devices. Our results show that for very low-power devices that utilize 802.15.4 wireless standard, measurement error is less than 4%. In addition, we obtain less than 3% error for 802.11-based devices that generate short and high power spikes.
The second contribution is the optimization the energy consumption of IoT devices in a duty cycled scenario by reducing boot up duration, shutdown duration, and user application duration. To this end, we study and improve the amount of time a Linux-based IoT device is powered on to accomplish its tasks. We analyze the processes of system boot up and shutdown on two platforms, the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless, and enhance duty-cycling performance by identifying and disabling time consuming or unnecessary units initialized in the userspace. We also study whether SD card speed and SD card capacity utilization affect boot up duration and energy consumption. In addition, we propose Pallex, a novel parallel execution framework built on top of the systemd init system to run a user application concurrently with userspace initialization. We validate the performance impact of Pallex when applied to various IoT application scenarios: (i) capturing an image, (ii) capturing and encrypting an image, (iii) capturing and classifying an image using the the k-nearest neighbor algorithm, and (iv) capturing images and sending them to a cloud server. Our results show that system lifetime is increased by 18.3%, 16.8%, 13.9% and 30.2%, for these application scenarios, respectively
Privacy in characterizing and recruiting patients for IoHT-aided digital clinical trials
Nowadays there is a tremendous amount of smart and connected devices that produce data. The so-called IoT is so pervasive that its devices (in particular the ones that we take with us during all the day - wearables, smartphones...) often provide some insights on our lives to third parties. People habitually exchange some of their private data in order to obtain services, discounts and advantages. Sharing personal data is commonly accepted in contexts like social networks but individuals suddenly become more than concerned if a third party is interested in accessing personal health data. The healthcare systems worldwide, however, begun to take advantage of the data produced by eHealth solutions. It is clear that while on one hand the technology proved to be a great ally in the modern medicine and can lead to notable benefits, on the other hand these processes pose serious threats to our privacy. The process of testing, validating and putting on the market a new drug or medical treatment is called clinical trial. These trials are deeply impacted by the technological advancements and greatly benefit from the use of eHealth solutions. The clinical research institutes are the entities in charge of leading the trials and need to access as much health data of the patients as possible. However, at any phase of a clinical trial, the personal information of the participants should be preserved and maintained private as long as possible. During this thesis, we will introduce an architecture that protects the privacy of personal data during the first phases of digital clinical trials (namely the characterization phase and the recruiting phase), allowing potential participants to freely join trials without disclosing their personal health information without a proper reward and/or prior agreement. We will illustrate what is the trusted environment that is the most used approach in eHealth and, later, we will dig into the untrusted environment where the concept of privacy is more challenging to protect while maintaining usability of data. Our architecture maintains the individuals in full control over the flow of their personal health data. Moreover, the architecture allows the clinical research institutes to characterize the population of potentiant users without direct access to their personal data. We validated our architecture with a proof of concept that includes all the involved entities from the low level hardware up to the end application. We designed and realized the hardware capable of sensing, processing and transmitting personal health data in a privacy preserving fashion that requires little to none maintenance
Towards the simulation of cooperative perception applications by leveraging distributed sensing infrastructures
With the rapid development of Automated Vehicles (AV), the boundaries of their function alities are being pushed and new challenges are being imposed. In increasingly complex
and dynamic environments, it is fundamental to rely on more powerful onboard sensors and
usually AI. However, there are limitations to this approach. As AVs are increasingly being
integrated in several industries, expectations regarding their cooperation ability is growing,
and vehicle-centric approaches to sensing and reasoning, become hard to integrate. The
proposed approach is to extend perception to the environment, i.e. outside of the vehicle,
by making it smarter, via the deployment of wireless sensors and actuators. This will vastly
improve the perception capabilities in dynamic and unpredictable scenarios and often in a
cheaper way, relying mostly in the use of lower cost sensors and embedded devices, which rely
on their scale deployment instead of centralized sensing abilities. Consequently, to support
the development and deployment of such cooperation actions in a seamless way, we require
the usage of co-simulation frameworks, that can encompass multiple perspectives of control
and communications for the AVs, the wireless sensors and actuators and other actors in the
environment. In this work, we rely on ROS2 and micro-ROS as the underlying technologies
for integrating several simulation tools, to construct a framework, capable of supporting the
development, test and validation of such smart, cooperative environments. This endeavor
was undertaken by building upon an existing simulation framework known as AuNa. We
extended its capabilities to facilitate the simulation of cooperative scenarios by incorporat ing external sensors placed within the environment rather than just relying on vehicle-based
sensors. Moreover, we devised a cooperative perception approach within this framework,
showcasing its substantial potential and effectiveness. This will enable the demonstration of
multiple cooperation scenarios and also ease the deployment phase by relying on the same
software architecture.Com o rápido desenvolvimento dos Veículos Autónomos (AV), os limites das suas funcional idades estão a ser alcançados e novos desafios estão a surgir. Em ambientes complexos
e dinâmicos, é fundamental a utilização de sensores de alta capacidade e, na maioria dos
casos, inteligência artificial. Mas existem limitações nesta abordagem. Como os AVs estão
a ser integrados em várias indústrias, as expectativas quanto à sua capacidade de cooperação estão a aumentar, e as abordagens de perceção e raciocínio centradas no veículo,
tornam-se difíceis de integrar. A abordagem proposta consiste em extender a perceção para
o ambiente, isto é, fora do veículo, tornando-a inteligente, através do uso de sensores e
atuadores wireless. Isto irá melhorar as capacidades de perceção em cenários dinâmicos e
imprevisíveis, reduzindo o custo, pois a abordagem será baseada no uso de sensores low-cost
e sistemas embebidos, que dependem da sua implementação em grande escala em vez da
capacidade de perceção centralizada. Consequentemente, para apoiar o desenvolvimento
e implementação destas ações em cooperação, é necessária a utilização de frameworks de
co-simulação, que abranjam múltiplas perspetivas de controlo e comunicação para os AVs,
sensores e atuadores wireless, e outros atores no ambiente. Neste trabalho será utilizado
ROS2 e micro-ROS como as tecnologias subjacentes para a integração das ferramentas de
simulação, de modo a construir uma framework capaz de apoiar o desenvolvimento, teste e
validação de ambientes inteligentes e cooperativos. Esta tarefa foi realizada com base numa
framework de simulação denominada AuNa. Foram expandidas as suas capacidades para
facilitar a simulação de cenários cooperativos através da incorporação de sensores externos
colocados no ambiente, em vez de depender apenas de sensores montados nos veículos.
Além disso, concebemos uma abordagem de perceção cooperativa usando a framework,
demonstrando o seu potencial e eficácia. Isto irá permitir a demonstração de múltiplos
cenários de cooperação e também facilitar a fase de implementação, utilizando a mesma
arquitetura de software