A Survey on Facilities for Experimental Internet of Things Research

International audienceThe initial vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) was of a world in which all physical objects are tagged and uniquelly identified by RFID transponders. However, the concept has grown into multiple dimensions, encompassing sensor networks able to provide real-world intelligence and goal-oriented collaboration of distributed smart objects via local networks or global interconnections such as the Internet. Despite significant technological advances, difficulties associated with the evaluation of IoT solutions under realistic conditions, in real world experimental deployments still hamper their maturation and significant roll out. In this article we identify requirements for the next generation of the IoT experimental facilities. While providing a taxonomy, we also survey currently available research testbeds, identify existing gaps and suggest new directions based on experience from recent efforts in this field

Making Wireless Sensor Network Simulators Cooperate

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Highway construction for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are a rapidly growing field of study with many open research topics. The aim of this project is to build a hierarchy of clusters in wireless sensor networks and to communicate them through distinguished paths. Those paths are known as highways, and simplify higher level node inter-communication while reducing energy and memory requirements. To achieve this goal several distributed algorithms were designed and tested either in simulators or in real hardware. The message delivery rate, through highways, measured in hardware was close to 70% and it effectively served as base for a higher level network module to make end to end communication between every node of the connected network. This opens a way for the development of more algorithms to make Wireless Sensor Networks communications on large deployments effective and troubleless.Postprint (published version

Middleware for wireless sensor network virtualization

Sensor and network virtualization technology are used in smart home, smart grid, smart city and many other applications of Internet of Things (IoT) that deploy Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to facilitate multiple sensor data transmission over multiple networks. Existing WSNs are designed for a specific application running on low data rate network. The challenge is how to ensure multiple sensor data for multiple applications be transmitted over multiple heterogeneous networks having different transmission rates while ensuring Quality-of-Service (QoS). The research has developed a middleware that provides sensor and network virtualization with guaranteed QoS. The middleware was designed comprising of two layers: Application Dependent Layer Middleware (ADLM) and Network Dependent Layer Middleware (NDLM). The ADLM combined multiple sensor data to form services based of Service Oriented Application (SOA). It is comprised of service handling manager that combines various sensor data and form services, QoS manager that assigns priority and service scheduling manager that forwards the service frames. The NDLM facilitated seamless transmissions of various service data over multiple heterogeneous networks. It consists of hypervisor which is composed of flowvisor and the powervisor. The flowvisor is madeup of transmit and routing managers responsible for routing and transmitting service packets. The powervisor consists of a resource manager that determines and selects the node with the highest battery power. The middleware was implemented and evaluated on a real experimental testbed. The experimental results showed that the middleware increased throughput by 8.7% and reduced the numbers of packets transmissions from the node by 68.7% compared to proxy middleware using SOA. In addition, end-to-end transmission delay was reduced by 85.2% when compared to SenShare using SOA. The flowvisor at the gateway decreased the waiting time of packets in the queue by 59.8%, when the flowvisor raised the output rate up to 2.5 times the maximum arrival rate of WSN packets. The powervisor increased the node’s life time by 17.6% when compared to VITRO by limiting the transmission power to the existing battery voltage level. In brief, the middleware has provided guaranteed QoS by increasing throughput, reducing end-to-end delay and minimizing energy consumption. The middleware is highly recommended for IoT applications such as smart city and smart grid

A Survey on (mobile) wireless sensor network experimentation testbeds

International audienceWith the development of new technologies, these last years have witnessed the emergence of a new paradigm: the Internet of Things (IoT) and of the physical world. We are now able to communicate and interact with our surrounding environ- ment through the use of multiple tiny sensors, RFID technologies or small wireless robots. This allows a set of new applications and usages to be envisioned ranging from logistic and traceability purposes to emergency and rescue operations going through the monitoring of volcanos or forest fires. However, all this comes with several technical and scientific issues like how to ensure the reliability of wireless communications in disturbed environments, how to manage efficiently the low resources (energy, memory, etc) or how to set a safe and sustainable maintenance. All these issues are addressed by researchers all around the world but solutions designed for IoT need to face real experimentations to be validated. To ease such experimentations for IoT, several experimental testbeds have been deployed offering diverse and heterogeneous services and tools. This article studies the different requirements and features such facilities should offer and survey the different experimental facilities currently available for the community, the different hardware used (as sensors and robots) and the scope of their services. We expect this survey assist a potential user to easily choose the one to use regarding his own needs. Finally, we identify existing gaps and difficulties and investigate new directions for such facilities

PhyNetLab: An IoT-Based Warehouse Testbed

Future warehouses will be made of modular embedded entities with communication ability and energy aware operation attached to the traditional materials handling and warehousing objects. This advancement is mainly to fulfill the flexibility and scalability needs of the emerging warehouses. However, it leads to a new layer of complexity during development and evaluation of such systems due to the multidisciplinarity in logistics, embedded systems, and wireless communications. Although each discipline provides theoretical approaches and simulations for these tasks, many issues are often discovered in a real deployment of the full system. In this paper we introduce PhyNetLab as a real scale warehouse testbed made of cyber physical objects (PhyNodes) developed for this type of application. The presented platform provides a possibility to check the industrial requirement of an IoT-based warehouse in addition to the typical wireless sensor networks tests. We describe the hardware and software components of the nodes in addition to the overall structure of the testbed. Finally, we will demonstrate the advantages of the testbed by evaluating the performance of the ETSI compliant radio channel access procedure for an IoT warehouse

Architectures for the Future Networks and the Next Generation Internet: A Survey

Networking research funding agencies in the USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/Disruption tolerant networks, which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available, are also discussed

A survey of evaluation platforms for ad hoc routing protocols: a resilience perspective

Routing protocols allow for the spontaneous formation of wireless multi-hop networks without dedicated infrastructure, also known as ad hoc networks. Despite significant technological advances, difficulties associated with the evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols under realistic conditions, still hamper their maturation and significant roll out in real world deployments. In particular, the resilience evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols is essential to determine their ability of keeping the routing service working despite the presence of changes, such as accidental faults or malicious ones (attacks). However, the resilience dimension is not always addressed by the evaluation platforms that are in charge of assessing these routing protocols. In this paper, we provide a survey covering current state-of-the-art evaluation platforms in the domain of ad hoc routing protocols paying special attention to the resilience dimension. The goal is threefold. First, we identify the most representative evaluation platforms and the routing protocols they have evaluated. Then, we analyse the experimental methodologies followed by such evaluation platforms. Finally, we create a taxonomy to characterise experimental properties of such evaluation platforms.This work is partially supported by the Spanish Project ARENES (TIN2012-38308-C02-01), the ANR French Project AMORES (ANR-11-INSE-010), and the Intel Doctoral Student Honour Programme 2012.Friginal López, J.; Andrés Martínez, DD.; Ruiz García, JC.; Martínez Raga, M. (2014). A survey of evaluation platforms for ad hoc routing protocols: a resilience perspective. Computer Networks. 75(A):395-413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2014.09.010S39541375

SmartSantander: IoT experimentation over a smart city testbed

This paper describes the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. The facility is implemented within the SmartSantander project, one of the projects of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative of the European Commission and represents a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility. Additionally, this facility supports typical applications and services of a smart city. Tangible results are expected to influence the definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The facility comprises a large number of Internet of Things devices deployed in several urban scenarios which will be federated into a single testbed. In this paper the deployment being carried out at the main location, namely Santander city, is described. Besides presenting the current deployment, in this article the main insights in terms of the architectural design of a large-scale IoT testbed are presented as well. Furthermore, solutions adopted for implementation of the different components addressing the required testbed functionalities are also sketched out. The IoT experimentation facility described in this paper is conceived to provide a suitable platform for large scale experimentation and evaluation of IoT concepts under real-life conditions.This work is funded by research project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. Authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest of partners within the consortium leading to the results presented in this paper