Integration of heterogeneous devices and communication models via the cloud in the constrained internet of things

As the Internet of Things continues to expand in the coming years, the need for services that span multiple IoT application domains will continue to increase in order to realize the efficiency gains promised by the IoT. Today, however, service developers looking to add value on top of existing IoT systems are faced with very heterogeneous devices and systems. These systems implement a wide variety of network connectivity options, protocols (proprietary or standards-based), and communication methods all of which are unknown to a service developer that is new to the IoT. Even within one IoT standard, a device typically has multiple options for communicating with others. In order to alleviate service developers from these concerns, this paper presents a cloud-based platform for integrating heterogeneous constrained IoT devices and communication models into services. Our evaluation shows that the impact of our approach on the operation of constrained devices is minimal while providing a tangible benefit in service integration of low-resource IoT devices. A proof of concept demonstrates the latter by means of a control and management dashboard for constrained devices that was implemented on top of the presented platform. The results of our work enable service developers to more easily implement and deploy services that span a wide variety of IoT application domains

Federated Sensor Network architectural design for the Internet of Things (IoT)

An information technology that can combine the physical world and virtual world is desired. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), WSN and barcode scanners to sense and to detect physical objects and events. This information is shared with people on the Internet. With the announcement of the Smarter Planet concept by IBM, the problem of how to share this data was raised. However, the original design of WSN aims to provide environment monitoring and control within a small scale local network. It cannot meet the demands of the IoT because there is a lack of multi-connection functionality with other WSNs and upper level applications. As various standards of WSNs provide information for different purposes, a hybrid system that gives a complete answer by combining all of them could be promising for future IoT applications. This thesis is on the subject of `Federated Sensor Network' design and architectural development for the Internet of Things. A Federated Sensor Network (FSN) is a system that integrates WSNs and the Internet. Currently, methods of integrating WSNs and the Internet can follow one of three main directions: a Front-End Proxy solution, a Gateway solution or a TCP/IP Overlay solution. Architectures based on the ideas from all three directions are presented in this thesis; this forms a comprehensive body of research on possible Federated Sensor Network architecture designs. In addition, a fully compatible technology for the sensor network application, namely the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), has been reviewed and embedded into our FSN systems. The IoT as a new concept is also comprehensively described and the major technical issues discussed. Finally, a case study of the IoT in logistic management for emergency response is given. Proposed FSN architectures based on the Gateway solution are demonstrated through hardware implementation and lab tests. A demonstration of the 6LoWPAN enabled federated sensor network based on the TCP/IP Overlay solution presents a good result for the iNET localization and tracking project. All the tests of the designs have verified feasibility and achieve the target of the IoT concept

Provision of adaptive and context-aware service discovery for the Internet of Things

The IoT concept has revolutionised the vision of the future Internet with the advent of standards such as 6LoWPAN making it feasible to extend the Internet into previously isolated environments, e.g., WSNs. The abstraction of resources as services, has opened these environments to a new plethora of potential applications. Moreover, the web service paradigm can be used to provide interoperability by offering a standard interface to interact with these services to enable WoT paradigm. However, these networks pose many challenges, in terms of limited resources, that make the adaptability of existing IP-based solutions infeasible. As traditional service discovery and selection solutions demand heavy communication and use bulky formats, which are unsuitable for these resource-constrained devices incorporating sleep cycles to save energy. Even a registry based approach exhibits burdensome traffic in maintaining the availability status of the devices. The feasible solution for service discovery and selection is instrumental to enable the wide application coverage of these networks in the future. This research project proposes, TRENDY, a new compact and adaptive registry-based SDP with context awareness for the IoT, with more emphasis given to constrained networks, e.g., 6LoWPAN It uses CoAP-based light-weight and RESTful web services to provide standard interoperable interfaces, which can be easily translated from HTTP. TRENDY's service selection mechanism collects and intelligently uses the context information to select appropriate services for user applications based on the available context information of users and services. In addition, TRENDY introduces an adaptive timer algorithm to minimise control overhead for status maintenance, which also reduces energy consumption. Its context-aware grouping technique divides the network at the application layer, by creating location-based groups. This grouping of nodes localises the control overhead and provides the base for service composition, localised aggregation and processing of data. Different grouping roles enable the resource-awareness by offering profiles with varied responsibilities, where high capability devices can implement powerful profiles to share the load of other low capability devices. Thus, it allows the productive usage of network resources. Furthermore, this research project proposes APPUB, an adaptive caching technique, that has the following benefits: it allows service hosts to share their load with the resource directory and also decreases the service invocation delay. The performance of TRENDY and its mechanisms is evaluated using an extensive number of experiments performed using emulated Tmote sky nodes in the COOJA environment. The analysis of the results validates the benefit of performance gain for all techniques. The service selection and APPUB mechanisms improve the service invocation delay considerably that, consequently, reduces the traffic in the network. The timer technique consistently achieved the lowest control overhead, which eventually decreased the energy consumption of the nodes to prolong the network lifetime. Moreover, the low traffic in dense networks decreases the service invocations delay, and makes the solution more scalable. The grouping mechanism localises the traffic, which increases the energy efficiency while improving the scalability. In summary, the experiments demonstrate the benefit of using TRENDY and its techniques in terms of increased energy efficiency and network lifetime, reduced control overhead, better scalability and optimised service invocation time

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

Denial of service mitigation approach for IPv6-enabled smart object networks

Denial of service (DoS) attacks can be defined as any third-party action aiming to reduce or eliminate a network's capability to perform its expected functions. Although there are several standard techniques in traditional computing that mitigate the impact of some of the most common DoS attacks, this still remains a very important open problem to the network security community. DoS attacks are even more troublesome in smart object networks because of two main reasons. First, these devices cannot support the computational overhead required to implement many of the typical counterattack strategies. Second, low traffic rates are enough to drain sensors' battery energy making the network inoperable in short times. To realize the Internet of Things vision, it is necessary to integrate the smart objects into the Internet. This integration is considered an exceptional opportunity for Internet growth but, also, a security threat, because more attacks, including DoS, can be conducted. For these reasons, the prevention of DoS attacks is considered a hot topic in the wireless sensor networks scientific community. In this paper, an approach based on 6LowPAN neighbor discovery protocol is proposed to mitigate DoS attacks initiated from the Internet, without adding additional overhead on the 6LoWPAN sensor devices.This work has been partially supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, and by National Funding from the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia through the Pest-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011.Oliveira, LML.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; De Sousa, AF.; Lloret, J. (2013). Denial of service mitigation approach for IPv6-enabled smart object networks. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 25(1):129-142. doi:10.1002/cpe.2850S129142251Gershenfeld, N., Krikorian, R., & Cohen, D. (2004). The Internet of Things. Scientific American, 291(4), 76-81. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1004-76Akyildiz, I. 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Secure store and forward proxy for dynamic IoT applications over M2M networks

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to generate a huge unforeseen amount of traffic flowing from Consumer Electronics devices to the network. In order to overcome existing interoperability problems, several standardization bodies have joined to bring a new generation of Machine to Machine (M2M) networks as a result of the evolution of wireless sensor/actor networks and mobile cellular networks to converged networks. M2M is expected to enable IoT paradigms and related concepts into a reality at a reasonable cost. As part of the convergence, several technologies preventing new IoT services to interfere with existing Internet services are flourishing. Responsive, message-driven, resilient and elastic architectures are becoming essential parts of the system. These architectures will control the entire data flow for an IoT system requiring sometimes to store, shape and forward data among nodes of a M2M network to improve network performance. However, IoT generated data have an important personal component since it is generated in personal devices or are the result of the observation of the physical world, so rises significant security concerns. This article proposes a novel opportunistic flexible secure store and forward proxy for M2M networks and its mapping to asynchronous protocols that guarantees data confidentiality