Let healthy links bloom: Scalable Link Checks in Low-Power Wireless Networks for Smart Health

International audienceLow-power, memory-ecient networking mechanisms are an essential part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and thus, fundamental to Smart Health applications lever-aging IoT. This paper presents Bloom-RPL, an optimization of RPL, the standard low-power routing protocol for IoT. This paper evaluates Bloom-RPL both on an emulator, and on an IoT testbed using real hardware , to conclude that Bloom-RPL dramatically improves RPL's link check scalability with respect to both IoT device density and convergence time needed to detect a link break

Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and analysis of DNS over CoAP (DoC), a new proposal for secure and privacy-friendly name resolution of constrained IoT devices. We implement different design choices of DoC in RIOT, an open-source operating system for the IoT, evaluate performance measures in a testbed, compare with DNS over UDP and DNS over DTLS, and validate our protocol design based on empirical DNS IoT data. Our findings indicate that plain DoC is on par with common DNS solutions for the constrained IoT but significantly outperforms when additional, CoAP standard features are used such as block-wise transfer or caching. With OSCORE for end-to-end security, we can save more than 10 kBytes of code memory compared to DTLS while enabling group communication without compromising the trust chain when using intermediate proxies or caches. We also discuss a scheme for very restricted links that compresses redundant or excessive information by up to 70%.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures, 4 table

The Need for a Name to MAC Address Mapping in NDN: Towards Quantifying the Resource Gain

International audienceIn this paper, we start from two observations. First, many application scenarios that benefit from ICN involve battery-driven nodes connected via shared media. Second, current link layer technologies are completely ICN-agnostic, which prevents filtering of ICN packets at the device driver level. Consequently, any ICN packet, Interest as well as Data, is processed by the CPU. This sacrifices local system resources and disregards link layer support functions such as wireless retransmission. We argue for a mapping of names to MAC addresses to efficiently handle ICN packets, and explore dynamic face-based mapping schemes. We analyze the impact of this link-layer adaptation in real-world experiments and quantitatively compare different configurations. Our findings on resource consumption, and reliability on constrained devices indicate significant gains in larger networks

Publish-Subscribe Deployment Option for NDN in the Constrained Internet of Things

Constrained IoT devices often operate more efficiently in a loosely coupled environment without maintaining end-to-end connectivity between nodes. Information Centric Networking naturally supports this demand by replicated data distribution and hop wise forwarding. This document outlines a deployment option for NDN in low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) that follows a publish-subscribe pattern. The proposed protocol scheme simplifies name-based routing significantly and facilitates even large off-duty cycles for constrained nodes

ICNLoWPAN -- Named-Data Networking in Low Power IoT Networks

Information Centric Networking is considered a promising communication technology for the constrained IoT, but NDN was designed only for standard network infrastructure. In this paper, we design and evaluate an NDN convergence layer for low power lossy links that (1) augments the NDN stateful forwarding with a highly efficient name eliding, (2) devises stateless compression schemes for standard NDN use cases, (3) adapts NDN packets to the small MTU size of IEEE 802.15.4, and (4) generates compatibility with 6LoWPAN so that IPv6 and NDN can coexist on the same LoWPAN links. Our findings indicate that stateful compression can reduce the size of NDN data packets by more than 70~% in realistic examples. Our experiments show that for common use cases ICNLoWPAN saves 33~% of transmission resources over NDN, and about 20~% over 6LoWPAN

Toward a RESTful Information-Centric Web of Things: A Deeper Look at Data Orientation in CoAP

The information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm offers replication of autonomously verifiable content throughout a network, in which content is bound to names instead of hosts. This has proven beneficial in particular for the constrained IoT. Several approaches, the most prominent of which being Named Data Networking, propose access to named content directly on the network layer. Independently, the IETF CoAP protocol group started to develop mechanisms that support autonomous content processing and in-network storage. In this paper, we explore the emerging CoAP protocol building blocks and how they contribute to an information-centric network architecture for a data-oriented RESTful Web of Things. We discuss design options and measure characteristic performances of different network configurations, which deploy CoAP proxies and OSCORE content object security, and compare with NDN. Our findings indicate an almost continuous design space ranging from plain CoAP at the one end to NDN on the other. On both ends - -ICN and CoAP - -we identify protocol features and aspects whose mutual transfer potentially improves design and operation of the other

A PUF Seed Generator for RIOT: Introducing Crypto-Fundamentals to the Wild

In this work, we present a random seeder for the RIOT operating system based on PUFs. Following the RIOT dedication as a general-purpose IoT operating system, we design a generic PUF extractor based on SRAM memory which is available on most platforms. We design a module for RIOT that hooks into the OS startup code right before kernel initialization. The patterns of a preserved and uninitialized SRAM block are fed into a hash function to derive the desired seed value. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first recent embedded security primitive that has entered a commodity operating system

HoPP: Robust and Resilient Publish-Subscribe for an Information-Centric Internet of Things

This paper revisits NDN deployment in the IoT with a special focus on the interaction of sensors and actuators. Such scenarios require high responsiveness and limited control state at the constrained nodes. We argue that the NDN request-response pattern which prevents data push is vital for IoT networks. We contribute HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a robust publish-subscribe scheme for typical IoT scenarios that targets IoT networks consisting of hundreds of resource constrained devices at intermittent connectivity. Our approach limits the FIB tables to a minimum and naturally supports mobility, temporary network partitioning, data aggregation and near real-time reactivity. We experimentally evaluate the protocol in a real-world deployment using the IoT-Lab testbed with varying numbers of constrained devices, each wirelessly interconnected via IEEE 802.15.4 LowPANs. Implementations are built on CCN-lite with RIOT and support experiments using various single- and multi-hop scenarios

An Alternative Delta Time encoding for CCNx using Interval Time from RFC5497

CCNx utilizes Delta Time for a number of functions. When using CCNx in environments with constrained nodes and/or bandwidth constrained networks, it is valuable to have a compressed representation of delta time. In order to do so, either accuracy or dynamic range has to be sacrificed. Since the current uses of delta time do not require both simultaneously, one can consider a logarithmic encoding such as that specified in RFC5497. This document updates _CCNx messages in TLV Format_ (RFC8609) to specify this alternative encoding

HoPP: Publish-Subscribe for the Constrained IoT

In this demo, we showcase our NDN based Publish--Subscribe scheme HoPP in a multi-hop low-power and lossy IoT deployment using constrained devices that operate RIOT. These devices publish temperature sensor readings and subscribe to fan control commands. We manually induce network disruptions to illustrate a seamless publisher and subscriber mobility with HoPP. A web-based dashboard highlights the network resilience and visualizes topology maintenance as well as traffic flows