Portability, compatibility and reuse of MAC protocols across different IoT radio platforms

To cope with the diversity of Internet of Things (loT) requirements, a large number of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed in scientific literature, many of which are designed for specific application domains. However, for most of these MAC protocols, no multi-platform software implementation is available. In fact, the path from conceptual MAC protocol proposed in theoretical papers, towards an actual working implementation is rife with pitfalls. (i) A first problem is the timing bugs, frequently encountered in MAC implementations. (ii) Furthermore, once implemented, many MAC protocols are strongly optimized for specific hardware, thereby limiting the potential of software reuse or modifications. (iii) Finally, in real-life conditions, the performance of the MAC protocol varies strongly depending on the actual underlying radio chip. As a result, the same MAC protocol implementation acts differently per platform, resulting in unpredictable/asymmetrical behavior when multiple platforms are combined in the same network. This paper describes in detail the challenges related to multi-platform MAC development, and experimentally quantifies how the above issues impact the MAC protocol performance when running MAC protocols on multiple radio chips. Finally, an overall methodology is proposed to avoid the previously mentioned cross-platform compatibility issues. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

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 Unified Wireless Sensor Network Framework

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been a significant area of research over the past decade. WSN systems are used in a wide range of applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, target tracking, wildlife tracking, personal health monitoring, machinery monitoring, and many others. With such wide ranging applications, there is active research in nearly every facet of the field including network topologies, communication protocols, node localization, time synchronization, and sensor data processing. This movement has largely been the result of the advances in microelectronics and low-power radio systems. These advancements have enabled the design and implementation of small, powerful, low-power, wireless sensor network systems. Like any emerging technology, a standard needs to be established to allow the advances in the field to be directly leveraged rather than requiring reinvention. This paper outlines the traditional approaches to WSN system design, and in contrast, proposes the necessary components of a unified WSN framework that would support the majority of present applications as well as providing the foundation for further advancements in the field

Internet of Things Architectures, Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions for Enhanced Living Environments and Healthcare Systems: A Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that o er an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant scientific innovations make it possible to develop IoT devices through countless services for sensing, data fusing, and logging capabilities that lead to several advancements for enhanced living environments (ELEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art on IoT architectures for ELEs and healthcare systems, with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, opportunities, open-source platforms, and operating systems. Furthermore, this document synthesizes the existing body of knowledge and identifies common threads and gaps that open up new significant and challenging future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Container-based microservice architecture for local IoT services

Abstract. Edge services are needed to save networking and computational resources on higher tiers, enable operation during network problems, and to help limiting private data propagation to higher tiers if the function needing it can be handled locally. MEC at access network level provides most of these features but cannot help when access network is down. Local services, in addition, help alleviating the MEC load and limit the data propagation even more, on local level. This thesis focuses on the local IoT service provisioning. Local service provisioning is subject to several requirements, related to resource/energy-efficiency, performance and reliability. This thesis introduces a novel way to design and implement a Docker container-based micro-service system for gadget-free future IoT (Internet of Things) network. It introduces a use case scenario and proposes few possible required micro-services as of solution to the scenario. Some of these services deployed on different virtual platforms along with software components that can process sensor data providing storage capacity to make decisions based on their algorithm and business logic while few other services deployed with gateway components to connect rest of the devices to the system of solution. It also includes a state-of-the-art study for design, implementation, and evaluation as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) based on container-based microservices with Docker. The used IoT devices are Raspberry Pi embedded computers along with an Ubuntu machine with a rich set of features and interfaces, capable of running virtualized services. This thesis evaluates the solution based on practical implementation. In addition, the thesis also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the system with respect to the empirical solution. The output of the thesis shows that the virtualized microservices could be efficiently utilized at the local and resource constrained IoT using Dockers. This validates that the approach taken in this thesis is feasible for providing such services and functionalities to the micro and nanoservice architecture. Finally, this thesis proposes numerous improvements for future iterations

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate