The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects

EC-IoT : an easy configuration framework for constrained IoT devices

Connected devices offer tremendous opportunities. However, their configuration and control remains a major challenge in order to reach widespread adoption by less technically skilled people. Over the past few years, a lot of attention has been given to improve the configuration process of constrained devices with limited resources, such as available memory and absence of a user interface. Still, a major deficiency is the lack of a streamlined, standardized configuration process. In this paper we propose EC-IoT, a novel configuration framework for constrained IoT devices. The proposed framework makes use of open standards, leveraging upon the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), an application protocol that enables HTTP-like RESTful interactions with constrained devices. To validate the proposed approach, we present a prototype implementation of the EC-IoT framework and assess its scalability.The research from DEWI project (www.dewi-project.eu) leading to these results has received funding from the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n 621353 and from the agency for Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO). The research from the ITEA2 FUSE-IT project (13023) leading to these results has re- ceived funding from the agency for Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO)

Design of a WSN Platform for Long-Term Environmental Monitoring for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a virtual view, via the Internet Protocol, to a huge variety of real life objects, ranging from a car, to a teacup, to a building, to trees in a forest. Its appeal is the ubiquitous generalized access to the status and location of any "thing" we may be interested in. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well suited for long-term environmental data acquisition for IoT representation. This paper presents the functional design and implementation of a complete WSN platform that can be used for a range of long-term environmental monitoring IoT applications. The application requirements for low cost, high number of sensors, fast deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance, and high quality of service are considered in the specification and design of the platform and of all its components. Low-effort platform reuse is also considered starting from the specifications and at all design levels for a wide array of related monitoring application