IoT-Based Cyber-Physical Communication Architecture: Challenges and Research Directions

In order to provide intelligent services, the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates millions of smart cyber-physical devices to be enabled with network connectivity to sense, collect, process, and exchange information. Unfortunately, the traditional communication infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and link failures, so it is a challenging task for the IoT to explore these applications. In order to begin research and contribute into the IoT-based cyber-physical digital world, one will need to know the technical challenges and research opportunities. In this study, several key technical challenges and requirements for the IoT communication systems are identified. Basically, privacy, security, intelligent sensors/actuators design, low cost and complexity, universal antenna design, and friendly smart cyber-physical system design are the main challenges for the IoT implementation. Finally, the authors present a diverse set of cyber-physical communication system challenges such as practical implementation, distributed state estimation, real-time data collection, and system identification, which are the major issues require to be addressed in implementing an efficient and effective IoT communication system

Industrial IoT devices and cyber-physical production systems: review and use case

“This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91334-6_40"The present paper describes the state of the art related to IIoT Devices and Cyber-Physical systems and presents a use case related to predictive maintenance. Industry 4.0 is the boost for smart manufacturing and demands flexibility and adaptability of all devices/machines in the shop floor. The machines must become smart and interact with other machines inside and outside the industries/factories. The predictive maintenance is a key topic in this industrial revolution. The reason is based on the idea that smart machines must be capable to automatically identify and predict possible faults and actuate before they occur. Vibrations can be problematic in electrical motors. For this reason, we address an experimental study associated with an automatic classification procedure, that runs in the smart devices to detect anomalies. The results corroborate the applicability and usefulness of this machine learning algorithm to predict vibration faults.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Developing a neighborhood-scale wireless notification prototype

We outline an innovative approach to thedevelopment of a prototype of a neighborhoodnotification system (NNS). The NNS applicationresiding on smart phones will use software definedradio and cognitive radio components to interfacewith radio frequency transceivers. Mesh networkingis proposed for emergency notification and disasterresponse coordination using NNS. Our focus hasbeen on the IEEE 802.15.4 and the very recent IEEE802.15.5 mesh networking standard for low data rateconnectivity among low power nodes (or nodeswhose power consumption needs to be low). Theinnovation stems from bringing together differenthardware and software components – some of which,like our Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform, arethemselves still evolving and others, like themeshing platform, are very new – to propose anadaptive, reconfigurable, infrastructure-less ad hocwireless solution to emergency communications inthe unlicensed ISM RF band

Evaluation of Arrowhead Framework in Condition Monitoring Application

The technological advancement in the field of electronics and information technology is changing how industrial automation systems are built. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. However, before this prophecy on the change can manifest, new architectural solutions are needed to fully leverage the abilities brought by cheaper sensors, more advanced communication technology and more powerful processing units. The Arrowhead Framework tries to tackle this problem by providing means for Service-oriented architecture via System-of-Systems approach, where so-called application systems consume services provided by so-called core systems, which provide means for service discovery, service registration and service authorization. The goal of the thesis was to evaluate The Arrowhead Framework by developing a demo application on the edge-cloud setup used in the condition monitoring system of vibrating screens manufactured by Metso. The demo applications objective was to ease the configuration and installation of industrial Linux PC’s at the edge of the network. The methodological model for the evaluation was based on the design science research process (DSRP), which provides a model for research of IT artefacts. As a result, the Arrowhead Framework’s core features were found helpful in the problem domain, and suitable for small-scale test setup. However, the implementation of the framework was found to be low quality and lacking features from a production-ready software artefact. The found shortcomings were reported as feedback for the ongoing development process of the framework

Fault-based Analysis of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

The fourth industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 tries to bridge the gap between traditional Electronic Design Automation (EDA) technologies and the necessity of innovating in many indus- trial fields, e.g., automotive, avionic, and manufacturing. This complex digitalization process in- volves every industrial facility and comprises the transformation of methodologies, techniques, and tools to improve the efficiency of every industrial process. The enhancement of functional safety in Industry 4.0 applications needs to exploit the studies related to model-based and data-driven anal- yses of the deployed Industrial Cyber-Physical System (ICPS). Modeling an ICPS is possible at different abstraction levels, relying on the physical details included in the model and necessary to describe specific system behaviors. However, it is extremely complicated because an ICPS is com- posed of heterogeneous components related to different physical domains, e.g., digital, electrical, and mechanical. In addition, it is also necessary to consider not only nominal behaviors but even faulty behaviors to perform more specific analyses, e.g., predictive maintenance of specific assets. Nevertheless, these faulty data are usually not present or not available directly from the industrial machinery. To overcome these limitations, constructing a virtual model of an ICPS extended with different classes of faults enables the characterization of faulty behaviors of the system influenced by different faults. In literature, these topics are addressed with non-uniformly approaches and with the absence of standardized and automatic methodologies for describing and simulating faults in the different domains composing an ICPS. This thesis attempts to overcome these state-of-the-art gaps by proposing novel methodologies, techniques, and tools to: model and simulate analog and multi-domain systems; abstract low-level models to higher-level behavioral models; and monitor industrial systems based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) paradigm. Specifically, the proposed contributions involve the exten- sion of state-of-the-art fault injection practices to improve the ICPSs safety, the development of frameworks for safety operations automatization, and the definition of a monitoring framework for ICPSs. Overall, fault injection in analog and digital models is the state of the practice to en- sure functional safety, as mentioned in the ISO 26262 standard specific for the automotive field. Starting from state-of-the-art defects defined for analog descriptions, new defects are proposed to enhance the IEEE P2427 draft standard for analog defect modeling and coverage. Moreover, dif- ferent techniques to abstract a transistor-level model to a behavioral model are proposed to speed up the simulation of faulty circuits. Therefore, unlike the electrical domain, there is no extensive use of fault injection techniques in the mechanical one. Thus, extending the fault injection to the mechanical and thermal fields allows for supporting the definition and evaluation of more reliable safety mechanisms. Hence, a taxonomy of mechanical faults is derived from the electrical domain by exploiting the physical analogies. Furthermore, specific tools are built for automatically instru- menting different descriptions with multi-domain faults. The entire work is proposed as a basis for supporting the creation of increasingly resilient and secure ICPS that need to preserve functional safety in any operating context

Integration of RFID and Industrial WSNs to Create A Smart Industrial Environment

A smart environment is a physical space that is seamlessly embedded with sensors, actuators, displays, and computing devices, connected through communication networks for data collection, to enable various pervasive applications. Radio frequency identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be used to create such smart environments, performing sensing, data acquisition, and communication functions, and thus connecting physical devices together to form a smart environment. This thesis first examines the features and requirements a smart industrial environment. It then focuses on the realization of such an environment by integrating RFID and industrial WSNs. ISA100.11a protocol is considered in particular for WSNs, while High Frequency RFID is considered for this thesis. This thesis describes designs and implementation of the hardware and software architecture necessary for proper integration of RFID and WSN systems. The hardware architecture focuses on communication interface and AI/AO interface circuit design; while the driver of the interface is implemented through embedded software. Through Web-based Human Machine Interface (HMI), the industrial users can monitor the process parameters, as well as send any necessary alarm information. In addition, a standard Mongo database is designed, allowing access to historical and current data to gain a more in-depth understanding of the environment being created. The information can therefore be uploaded to an IoT Cloud platform for easy access and storage. Four scenarios for smart industrial environments are mimicked and tested in a laboratory to demonstrate the proposed integrated system. The experimental results have showed that the communication from RFID reader to WSN node and the real-time wireless transmission of the integrated system meet design requirements. In addition, compared to a traditional wired PLC system where measurement error of the integrated system is less than 1%. The experimental results are thus satisfactory, and the design specifications have been achieved

NETWORK TRAFFIC CHARACTERIZATION AND INTRUSION DETECTION IN BUILDING AUTOMATION SYSTEMS

The goal of this research was threefold: (1) to learn the operational trends and behaviors of a realworld building automation system (BAS) network for creating building device models to detect anomalous behaviors and attacks, (2) to design a framework for evaluating BA device security from both the device and network perspectives, and (3) to leverage new sources of building automation device documentation for developing robust network security rules for BAS intrusion detection systems (IDSs). These goals were achieved in three phases, first through the detailed longitudinal study and characterization of a real university campus building automation network (BAN) and with the application of machine learning techniques on field level traffic for anomaly detection. Next, through the systematization of literature in the BAS security domain to analyze cross protocol device vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses for uncovering research gaps as the foundational basis of our proposed BA device security evaluation framework. Then, to evaluate our proposed framework the largest multiprotocol BAS testbed discussed in the literature was built and several side-channel vulnerabilities and software/firmware shortcomings were exposed. Finally, through the development of a semi-automated specification gathering, device documentation extracting, IDS rule generating framework that leveraged PICS files and BIM models.Ph.D

Emulation of Industrial Control Field Device Protocols

It has been shown that thousands of industrial control devices are exposed to the Internet, however, the extent and nature of attacks on such devices remains unknown. The first step to understanding security problems that face modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and industrial controls networks is to understand the various attacks launched on Internet-connected field devices. This thesis describes the design and implementation of an industrial control emulator on a Gumstix single-board computer as a solution. This emulator acts as a decoy field device, or honeypot, intended to be probed and attacked via an Internet connection. Evaluation techniques are developed to assess the accuracy of the emulation implemented on the Gumstix and are compared against the implementation on a standard PC and the emulation target, a Koyo DirectLogic 405 programmable logic controller. The results show that both the Gumstix and PC emulator platforms are very accurate to the workloads presented. This suggests that a honeypot implemented on a Gumstix emulator and a standard PC are both suitable for applications in SCADA attack-landscape research