Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

Security in smart object networks

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to an inter-connected world where physical devices are seamlessly integrated into the Internet and become active participants of business, information and social processes. This involves the inter-connection of a large number of heterogeneous networked entities and networks. Emergence of technologies such as Zigbee, Bluetooth low energy and embedded sensors has transformed simple physical devices into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such smart objects form the building blocks for the Internet of Things. The communication infrastructure for these objects is based on an extension of the Internet protocol stack. Although the need for security is widely accepted, there is no clear consensus on how IP-based Internet security protocols can be applied to resource-constrained smart object networks. In this thesis, we develop a new secure and energy efficient communication model for the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a light-weight communication protocol designed for smart object networks. We contribute to the standardization of the generic communication architecture by adding security and delegation components for smart objects that sleep for large amounts of time during their operational phase. This architecture ensures data integrity and authenticity over a multi-hop network topology. It also provides a mirroring mechanism that uses a proxy to serve data on behalf of sleeping smart objects, thereby allowing them to act as always-online web servers. A working prototype implementation of the architecture is also developed. The security features in the architecture presented in this thesis are based on using strong public-key cryptography. Contrary to popular belief, our performance evaluation shows that asymmetric public-key cryptography can be implemented on small 8-bit micro-controllers without modifying the underlying cryptographic algorithms

From mechatronics to the Cloud

At its conception mechatronics was viewed purely in terms of the ability to integrate the technologies of mechanical and electrical engineering with computer science to transfer functionality, and hence complexity, from the mechanical domain to the software domain. However, as technologies, and in particular computing technologies, have evolved so the nature of mechatronics has changed from being purely associated with essentially stand-alone systems such as robots to providing the smart objects and systems which are the building blocks for Cyber-Physical Systems, and hence for Internet of Things and Cloud-based systems. With the possible advent of a 4th Industrial Revolution structured around these systems level concepts, mechatronics must again adapt its world view, if not its underlying technologies, to meet this new challenge

ANNA: A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR DATA SECURITY IN HEALTHCARE INTERNET OF THINGS

Today, the cyber-physical interactions are made possible with the development of internet and smart technologies. Smart objects such as sensors, RFID tags and actuators are the building blocks of such pervasive network, called as Internet of Things (IoT). IoT has a good number of real time applications in all domains including medical industry. It has great impact on modern healthcare with promising economic, technological and social benefits. Researchers across the globe already have started to explore a variety of technological solutions to enhance healthcare system by incorporating the potential of the IoT. This paper presents a unified framework ANNA, for integrating IoT in healthcare system. It presents three lightweight algorithms to enhance data security in the smart healthcare environment. In addition, this paper provides a detailed working scenario which would be helpful in implementing smart healthcare units in rural India. The working scenario of the ANNA smart healthcare system and the workflow of the framework are also elaborated in this paper. The proposed framework is proved against possible attacks in the healthcare environment. The salient features of the framework are outlined and this research creates a hope that the smart healthcare units based on ANNA framework will offer on time medical care to the needy and the downtrodden

The internet of ontological things: On symmetries between ubiquitous problems and their computational solutions in the age of smart objects

This dissertation is about an abstract form of computer network that has recently earned a new physical incarnation called “the Internet of Things.” It surveys the ontological transformations that have occurred over recent decades to the computational components of this network, objects—initially designed as abstract algorithmic agents in a source code of computer programming but now transplanted into real-world objects. Embodying the ideal of modularity, objects have provided computer programmers with more intuitive means to construct a software application with lots of simple and reusable functional building blocks. Their capability of being reassembled into many different networks for a variety of applications has also embodied another ideal of computing machines, namely general-purposiveness. In the algorithmic cultures of the past century, these objects existed as mere abstractions to help humans to understand electromagnetic signals that had infiltrated every corner of automatized spaces from private to public. As an instrumental means to domesticate these elusive signals into programmable architectures according to the goals imposed by professional programmers and amateur end-users, objects promised a universal language for any computable human activities. This utopian vision for the object-oriented domestication of the digital has had enough traction for the growth of the software industry as it has provided an alibi to hide another process of colonization occurring on the flipside of their interfacing between humans and machines: making programmable the highest number of online and offline human activities possible. A more recent media age, which this dissertation calls the age of the Internet of Things, refers to the second phase of this colonization of human cultures by the algorithmic objects, no longer trapped in the hard-wired circuit boards of personal computer, but now residing in real-life objects with new wireless communicability. Chapters of this dissertation examine each different computer application—a navigation system in a smart car, smart home, open-world video games, and neuro-prosthetics—as each particular case of this object-oriented redefinition of human cultures

The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201